Remarkable rendering speed up

lamoid_5f20d3e469

I have posted here in the past to complain about my experience with DS v4.20 rendering much more slowly than v4.16. It is different now.

Wanting to use the new G9 mesh, but not wanting to overwrite DS v4.16 just yet, I installed 4.21.1.29 Pro Edition (64-bit) Public Build. A duplicate file issue led me to read the log file where it said something about having the wrong version of cuda. I have a Nvidia RTX 2070. So I installed the latest driver for it, v528.49 2023.02.08 studio driver (not the game-ready driver). As a result I experienced a very significant improvement in iray rendering speed within Studio 4.21.1.29. 

I had it render a single, isolated standing G9 female figure with arms at its side against the DS default transparent background, with three lights, within a 2048-column by 8192-row window. A render with a G8F equivalent figure in studio v4.16 took anywhere from 30mins to an hour. This new one takes (according to the log) 6 minutes 36.46 seconds.

That is amazing to me. Full scenes at 4k x 6k resolution that took more than 2 hours to render are coming in at under an hour. Have you experienced any such speed ups?  Have you any ideas what has made this happen?

A bit more info:

I am using a windows-10 box that I built. (I'll post the hardware specs below if anyone wants them.) The Nvidia device driver I had been using was v 516.94.

The figure is a G9 female with skin (iray, complex detailed, 4096 res maps, with SSS), hair [head (Hollie for g9F) , body (exnem for G8F, from Renderosity), facial vellus (peach fuzz for G3F, sku:32565), & my own strand-based editor leg stubble)  fully dressed (ShanasSoulmate, 10-in-one casual wardrobe, pants with short mats, and neck-holder top).

Just FYI

lamoid_5f20d3e469

Has anyone else noticed this? Is it because of optimizations to studio or the new nvidia driver or both? At first the 4.2x.x.x releases wer much slower than 4.16.x.x. But in my experience that has changed. Just curious as to your experiences with them. 

The program does keep getting better. The realism of my latest renders is stunning.

Thank you!

PS in the previous post above I should have said exnem's body hair.

DrunkMonkeyProductions

I'd say the lack of responses is due to most of us not seeing anywhere near the results you're reporting.

Thus far, I've only seen margin of error differences in my benchmarking results, and no noticeable difference in general use.

If i were to hazard a guess, there's a difference with the previous renders, that you're not aware of, that was causing the increased render time.

It could be render setting(s) being enabled/disabled, that's now are/aren't, or something(s) in the scene, such as a messed up shader, that was causing issues.

 

What i'd suggest is to do a direct comparison.

Since 4.21.1.29 is the beta release you can have the current, 4.21.0.5, or previous, general release, installed simultaneously. One version at a time though.

Set up a scene, in the previous version, then render in that, then render the same scene in the beta and see if there's a difference. Be sure to save the scene, close DS and then open and do a clean load of the scene, to keep certain variables to a minimum.

Be sure to check for any differences in render settings, material(surfaces) settings, light settings, mesh resolution, etc. as well as system ram, vram, cpu and gpu utilization. You can have both the beta and general release open simultaneously, so it won't be that difficult to look for differences.

If there turns out to be no differences, and the render times continue to be as wildly different as you're reporting, then i say, great, move on and don't worry about it.