Anyone using 32gb system RAM with 12gb GPU?
savagestug
Posts: 177
I seem to recall something about needing 3x GPU memory for system memory when using Iray. I've been having more frequent drops to CPU with 4.2, expecially when rendering multiple G8.1 figures. And I always drop to CPU when setting SubD to 4, even with a single figure.
Anyone running an RTX 3060 with 32gb of system RAM? Unfortunately, I'm stuck with 32gb max in my pre-built desktop with an RTX 2070 super, and my laptop has an RTX 3070, but the same issues pops up there due to only having 8gb of VRAM.
I'm worried I won't get full benefit of the extra VRAM if I upgrade the desktop to a 3060.
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The memory management in Daz studio is absolutely terrible. Most of the time its not a matter of not having enough memory. Next time you notice a scene falling back to CPU or rendering a black screen, try this:
Often times, a scene that would run out of VRAM would render fine after a proper scene reload. The moment I move or change anything in the scene, it can go back to running out of VRAM. Which makes NO sense when I don't add anything in the scene that would increase memory use. Daz really needs to hire a proper rendering engineer to solve this issue once and for all. The blame can be pointed to IRAY all you want, but its clear recent versions of Daz studio have become increasingly worse with managing VRAM and it needs to be resolved. People are wasting hardware resources when Daz is being lazy not properly optimizing their software. The work around I described above is something Daz can easily solve.
Other modern programs that use IRAY rendering figured it out, Daz just needs to focus on solving problems. But maybe they are throwing everything they got into Studio 5.0.
I use 32GB with a RTX 3060, I've loaded up huge scenes that max. out the VRAM, (approx. 11.5GB).
Which indicates the limited main memory didn't stop full use of the GPU but more/faster memory would probably help alleviate the slow, sluggish performance I get when approaching the limit.
yeah, DS has very poor memory management . If you leave any renders open, that too will kill your system. I complained about that some time ago, probably 4.10, was told they were working on it, and it is still present in 4.2. I started doing what ArgleSW stated. Helps a lot.
It would be cool if there were an affordable graphics card with 64gig of ram. Why is it such a tiny amount anyway? On the other hand, why can;t it utilize system ram?
But it does.
Attached is a test I made some time ago (with my old GPU) to see how much RAM and VRAM was used while rendering in IRAY
Case a) just one lightweight G8 figure with lightweight clothing and hair
Case b) four similar G8 characters with architecture
Case c and d) started increasing SubD on the characters to see at which point the rendering would drop to CPU
"RAM/GB" and "VRAM/MB" taken from GPU-Z, "DS Log/GiB" taken from DS Log, no other programs were running but DS and GPU-Z
The "DS Log/GiB" is the sum of Geometry usage, Texture usage and Working Space - After Geometry and Textures, there should still be at least a Gigabyte of VRAM available for the Working space => In my case, Geometry + Textures should not exceed 4.7GiB
Note; Case c) was already using 38GB's of RAM, even though the rendering was done on the GPU, Case d) when rendering on CPU the RAM usage went almost over my 64GB's
Tests made using RTX 2070 Super (8GB), i7-5820K, 64GB's of RAM on W7 Ultimate and DS 4.15
A RTX 3090 has 24 GB of GPU memory, so maybe a better question to ask, is there anyone using a RTX 3090 in a machine that is limited to 32 GB of physical RAM? If so, what's the largest GPU memory scene have you loaded, before your physical RAM maxxed out?
...I have 24 GB of system memory and am running a Titan-X with 12 GB VRAM. So far no serious issues. but then I haven't turned the dial up to "epic" level quite yet (at most using only 4- 6 GB of VRAM).
Still in acharacter rebuilding/recovery phase after a drive meltdown that took everything.
I manage to fill all 24gb on a 3090 easily with 32gb system memory. But the system will slow down a lot on stuff using more than 16 ish due to heavy swap file usage.
If you use any DForce items then no, you won't be able to fill all 24 before you hit the Windows 10 maximum combined committed 128GB for a 32 actual system. Committed being windows task manager term for actual + swap. Dunno about 11, only moved one system onto it recently.
I had zero trouble using a 3060 with 32gb system ram for the month I had one.
I think strand based hair takes up little physical memory, as the geometry doesn't exist until it gets rendered. Same goes for instanced objects. So, filling up more GPU memory than system memory available must be possible.
There are two things that take up memory with 3D.
-Geometry data
-Texture data
Every time you subdivide, you increase geometry by quite a bit. Genesis at higher subD levels can seriously eat up a lot of memory.
Texture data is a little different. Iray compresses textures BEFORE sending to VRAM. Meanwhile the texture data is fully uncompressed in your system RAM. Iray actually does quite a lot of compression by default, but you can adjust this. Adjusting the compression in the advanced settings of Iray can wildly inflate how much VRAM you need.
By default Iray compresses textures over 512 pixels by a "medium" amount. It compresses 1024 and above by a "high" amount. Considering that most Genesis 8 characters have 4096 pixel textures, you can see that basically every single texture in a scene might be heavily compressed by Iray for the VRAM. I believe it counts the pixels vertically, in case you have non square textures, but I am not sure. It may be whichever side is longer.
So it depends on what your scene has in it, and what your compressions settings are. If you use the default settings and you build a scene with a lot of big textures, you will use a lot more RAM than VRAM. And this where the idea of needing 3x or more RAM than VRAM comes from.
But if you turn your compression settings down (by increasing the numbers), then you will be using a lot more VRAM and your VRAM will more closely match your RAM. I would wager a lot of people turn their compression down a little because sometimes you get texture bleed in your renders. (In case you were not aware, that is how handle textures bleeding into each other if that happens.)
There is no compression for geometry.
Another trick is hiding objects in the scene tab. Hiding objects or bones will save them from being loaded into VRAM. But they are still in RAM, of course. So if you like to hide a lot of objects in a scene for any number of reasons, you may find yourself running out of RAM.
I personally have pushed past 50GB of RAM with my 1080ti, which only has 11GB of VRAM. I have a 3090 now, and honestly I have not paid as much attention to my memory usage since. But there is a video of a Daz user running out of 64GB of RAM when his 3090 only had about 17GB in use. He was doing a test to see how many unique and dressed Genesis 8 figures he could load into the scene with a 3090. He was surprised when Daz crashed when it did because he still had VRAM, only to realize it was RAM he ran out of.
If you cut those in half, you can imagine his setup running out of 32GB of RAM with only 8 or 9GB of VRAM in use. It would be possible to make some tweaks to better balance the two, like probably reducing the SubD of the G8s in the scene. After all, a shot with a dozen people in it I think it is a given that most are going to be far enough from the camera that reducing subD will not make a visual difference. Then he could probably have got a couple more G8s in there before hitting either the VRAM or RAM cap.
I just got my new PC, I can't wait to use it. I am waiting for my new Keyboard and mouse. But it's an I9 with a RTX 3090 34GB. It has 64GB ram, but not sure how much that is going to help.
My cap is 64GB now. It hasn't been a problem yet. I have ran around 16GB of VRAM in some scenes, so I have not pushed the full VRAM of the 3090 yet, but it certainly has gone past my 1080ti's 11GB numerous times. So in that respect, it has been worth it to me. I have hit about 55GB of RAM in some scenes, so there is still room for more.
BTW, it does seem that the RTX uses less VRAM than the GTX did. So there is that. GTX cards have to emulate what the ray tracing cores do, and that takes some memory. So besides having more memory than my old 1080ti, I also use less memory than I did before. I don't know how much, it should not be that significant, but perhaps for people who feel restricted with GTX cards and already have low amounts of VRAM as it is, this hurts them more. It seems unfair to GTX owners, but that is the situation.
What that means is that the 2080ti, 3060 or 3080 will have a bit more room than the 1080ti does because of this.
...yeah that's why unless I roll back to 4.11, I don't get the full 12 GB of my Titan-X
RTX-Emulation takes about a gigabyte
The amount of VRAM available for geometry and textures on RTX cards is about 3GB's less than installed on the card, and on non-RTX cards about 4GB's less than installed.
Does Studio have a status bar displaying how much SRAM/VRAM the current scene is eating up?
Maybe on the GPU driving a monitor, but not so for GPUs with no display. Windows 10 used to take a percentage of VRAM, but an update to Windows wiped it down to less than 900MB on my 1080ti. Checking the log Iray would show 10.1GB of VRAM available.
With my current build, Iray reports my 3090 has 22.906GB available, so only 1.1GB is reserved. My 3060 reports 11.057GB is available, so about a GB is reserved on it.
When rendering, my GPU software could show 10.9GB of VRAM used on my 1080ti back in the day. So far I have not threaded the needle so close on my 3060, but I have hit 11GB once. When I knew I was going over I switched it off so Daz wouldn't have any issues from it dropping out.
Since you have a Titan you can use TCC mode on that card. But you need a GPU to drive the monitor.
I can't go back to 4.11 period, it does not support any generation after Pascal. So I can't use my 3090 at all on that.
That is something too, if anybody gets the 4000 series, it will almost certainly require a new version of Daz Studio and Iray to be able to use it. This could be a problem for some people given how 4.20+ decided to break Ghost Lights and other favorite features. With a 3090 I honestly do not need Ghost Lights for performance, but I like how they look in some scenes. Plus if you have any kind of on going series you are working on...NEVER update without first knowing it will look the same. The Iray Dev Team has been really tweaking all sorts of things with Iray, for better and worse. But sometimes consistancy is more important than accuracy or performance. This is kind of a forgotten aspect of upgrading Daz Studio.
Also, given both the Iray team and Daz Studio's track record, you just can't trust them for when the software will actually get updated. You could buy a 4090 on day 1 and find it is useless for 3 months, or more. The Pascal series was famously unsupported by Iray for a good many months. The Beta channel eventually got it (still WAAAYYY too late but at least they got it,) but the full release did not get it for ages. Some people cannot use a beta in their work environment due to company policy. And some people just are scared of the term "beta" and refuse to touch it. Yet even more people might have no idea Daz Studio even offers a beta! Since it is hidden in the downloader unless you specifically know how to find it. Either way these people were left in the dark for a real long painful time by Daz and Iray unless they had a backup GPU. We can hope that doesn't happen again, but since Daz is so super secretive they will never actually say when to expect a new version is coming.
Windows 10 takes about a gigabyte (W7 just 200MB's), DS takes a few hundred megabytes, the baseload of the scene takes a few hundred megabytes (depends on the scene) and there must be a "Working space" for Iray rendering, on DS 4.15 the default working space is 1.7GiB, on DS 4.20 the default working space is 1.9GiB. DS adjusts the working space based on what's available, but if the working space is less than about a gigabyte, it starts slowing down Iray rendering.
What is left after all the above is taken into consideration, is what's available for geometry and textures and that is what's important for Iray rendering.
It's easy to check, how much VRAM is taken at which stage - Restart the computer, open the GPU-Z, check the base load by the OS, start DS, check the amount of used VRAM, load scene, check the amount of used VRAM, start rendering and monitor the usage of VRAM.
Unfortunately, DS 4.20 doesn't report the VRAM usage of geometry and textures anymore like DS 4.15 does.
Attached is a test I made some time ago (with my old GPU) to see how much RAM and VRAM was used while rendering in IRAY
Case a) just one lightweight G8 figure with lightweight clothing and hair
Case b) four similar G8 characters with architecture
Case c and d) started increasing SubD on the characters to see at which point the rendering would drop to CPU
"RAM/GB" and "VRAM/MB" taken from GPU-Z, "DS Log/GiB" taken from DS Log, no other programs were running but DS and GPU-Z
The "DS Log/GiB" is the sum of Geometry usage, Texture usage and Working Space - After Geometry and Textures, there should still be at least a Gigabyte of VRAM available for the Working space => In my case, Geometry + Textures should not exceed 4.7GiB
Note; Case c) was already using 38GB's of RAM, even though the rendering was done on the GPU, Case d) when rendering on CPU the RAM usage went almost over my 64GB's
Tests made using RTX 2070 Super (8GB), i7-5820K, 64GB's of RAM on W7 Ultimate and DS 4.15
...another reason I'm also staying with 7 and looking to update to Broadwell Xeon CPU architecture (the last generation before Skylake-X which still supports W7). I know I'll hit a "ceiling" when Daz Iray goes beyond the driver I currently have installed.(I'm 4 drivers ahead of what is currently required so I'll probably be good for a few more updates, though likely not Daz 5.x whenever that comes out).
@ Outrider42. I have a 3060 but my MB's BIOS is so old it won't fully support it and I even have the last update available, so it's back in the box for now. The MBs I'm looking at should be able to support it as they have PCIe 3.0 X16 expansion slots (my MB has 2.0).
It doesn't know for Iray.
That is on the primary GPU. Now run that test with multiple GPUs, where the extra GPUs have no monitor attched. They will use significantly less VRAM. My secondary GPU has 0 bytes used, and doesn't see a single byte until I use it in Iray. As the secondary GPU, it is also not driving the display running the Daz application, either. The display GPU is running the work space. So the secondary GPU is only limited by what Windows takes.
That is what I am saying. That is why you see users who like to run cheap GPU for display and use their big GPU strictly for Daz Studio.
Don't have W10 and haven't seen any evidence that GPU not connected to a monitor would have more VRAM available,
I had two Maxwell TITANS on a 32GB system in 2015. No issues at all, so you should be good!