Is my PC good enough for Daz3D?

Magic Dragon 3D

Hello guys. I finally managed to learn how to use this wonderful software but I have some questions about performance and if my PC is good enough for Daz3D and 3D softwares in general. As I said on my first post, I'm a 3D beginner hobbyist artist that loves visual/graphic novels and romance stories and I intend do create some good and spicy adventures but I need to make sure that my PC is capable to handle multiple scenarios (interior and exterior) such as houses, restaurants, nightclubs, beaches and among many others and multiple humans (male and female, around 3 and 5 max) characters using Genesis 8 and 9 with good textures and more realistic possible. My current setup:

CPU: Intel® Xeon® E5-2670 v3 @ 2.30 GHz (12C/24T)
GPU: Gainward GeForce RTX™ 3060 Ghost 12 GB
RAM: Atermiter DDR4 ECC 3200 MHz 32 GB (2x 16 GB)
SSDs: Kingston NV1 500GB M.2 2280 NVMe + KingSpec 2TB (Daz3D and games)
OS: Windows 11 Pro

Is this config enough for what I'm intending to do?

SofaCitizen

I'll let others chip in on the main analysing of the hardware since I am not really in the know with that anymore. You'll probably find that by default the scenes you are creating are going to exceed the VRAM on your graphics card often which will mean that they fallback to the CPU and take WAY longer. That would be very bad if you are looking to make a Visual Novel and so will need to churn out many renders as quickly as possible.

Therefore, you should make a note to check out some products to help with that. Scene Optimiser and Camera View Optimiser are two good ones and also there are "Resource Saver" shaders that will be a bit more resource-sensitive. Probably best for you to get stuck in making some scenes with the default and/or free assets first until you get a feel for what will work with your setup.

Magic Dragon 3D

SofaCitizen said:

I'll let others chip in on the main analysing of the hardware since I am not really in the know with that anymore. You'll probably find that by default the scenes you are creating are going to exceed the VRAM on your graphics card often which will mean that they fallback to the CPU and take WAY longer. That would be very bad if you are looking to make a Visual Novel and so will need to churn out many renders as quickly as possible.

Therefore, you should make a note to check out some products to help with that. Scene Optimiser and Camera View Optimiser are two good ones and also there are "Resource Saver" shaders that will be a bit more resource-sensitive. Probably best for you to get stuck in making some scenes with the default and/or free assets first until you get a feel for what will work with your setup.

Sorry, I didn't quite understand your answer. So technically speaking my PC would not be powerful enough to meet my demands with visual novels? In case I have to limit something in my projects or use some configuration in Daz that does not exceed the use of VRAM? I thought the Daz would handle at least 12GB of VRAM well, even though that's the bare minimum these days. 

FSMCDesigns

You have a good amount of VRAM for regular scenes, but depending on how detailed the environment is and if you have more than 2 tp 3 fully clothed figures, you could run out of resources. Keep in mind that all 3D assets are not made the same and as such, use different amounts of resources. You could render a scene with 5 figures and an environment if everything in the scene was optimized, meaning, reduced texure sizes, limit the amount of textures, no HD meshes and minimal lights. Your CPU is the bottleneck since you will need to rely on it if/when you run out of VRAM.

You will need this product https://www.daz3d.com/scene-optimizer

Magic Dragon 3D

FSMCDesigns said:

You have a good amount of VRAM for regular scenes, but depending on how detailed the environment is and if you have more than 2 tp 3 fully clothed figures, you could run out of resources. Keep in mind that all 3D assets are not made the same and as such, use different amounts of resources. You could render a scene with 5 figures and an environment if everything in the scene was optimized, meaning, reduced texure sizes, limit the amount of textures, no HD meshes and minimal lights. Your CPU is the bottleneck since you will need to rely on it if/when you run out of VRAM.

You will need this product https://www.daz3d.com/scene-optimizer

I understood. It means that it would be better to use optimization tools in Daz Studio to avoid possible crashes when working with heavier scenes, right? I'm going to work with graphic novel adults only with detailed scenes (characters and environment), so it would be interesting if I could render in the best possible quality (respecting the limits of my hardware, of course), because I'm going to publish these graphic novels on my crowdfunding networks such as Patreon/Subscribestar, so I don't want to ruin my job with low quality images. 

SofaCitizen

It's not crashes per-se that will be the problem, but if you add too much into your scene then the render will falback to CPU which is incredibly slow by comparison. If you are producing a visual novel then this is more of an issue due to the fact that you'd naturally be producing a lot of images.

Using scene optimiser doesn't necessarily mean you will be reducing the quality of your images tho. Most figures are designed to look good close-up and so if you have several in your scene they will naturally be further away from the camera and so do not need to be as detailed. Thus, you can use Scene Optimiser to halve their textures and perhaps that would be enough to keep your scene within your VRAM while not making any quality difference to the final rendered image.

Magic Dragon 3D

SofaCitizen said:

It's not crashes per-se that will be the problem, but if you add too much into your scene then the render will falback to CPU which is incredibly slow by comparison. If you are producing a visual novel then this is more of an issue due to the fact that you'd naturally be producing a lot of images.

Using scene optimiser doesn't necessarily mean you will be reducing the quality of your images tho. Most figures are designed to look good close-up and so if you have several in your scene they will naturally be further away from the camera and so do not need to be as detailed. Thus, you can use Scene Optimiser to halve their textures and perhaps that would be enough to keep your scene within your VRAM while not making any quality difference to the final rendered image.

Thanks for the info. I believed that I could have problems like crashes, but the important thing is to keep the VRAM usage stable so that the CPU usage is not so intense that everything slows down. From what I've been seeing, the RTX 3060 12GB would be a reasonable card for someone starting with Daz3D. It's not a high-end enthusiast card, but it performs very well with a good amount of VRAM, as the Daz3D is basically a VRAM eater. For graphic novels per se, would this card do the job very well using the optimization options? How good is RTX 3060 12GB using Iray? I still don't have much knowledge with Daz3D yet, but I'm learning little by little and discovering something new every day. 

SofaCitizen

Well, I would say that yes, it's perfectly fine - however I might not be the best person to ask since I am one of those people that takes a LONG time to build and "perfect" a scene and so I can easily afford to spend time optimising it and tweaking things to make it render nicely.

Whether it will be suitable for you is probably only a question that you will be able to answer after you have experimented and tested out the kind of scenes that you are looking to make for your VN. As FSMCDesigns said, not all environments will take up the same amount of resource - how much they take up will be down to a combination of how well (efficiently) they were built, how detailed they are designed to be, how "busy" they are & how big they are.  Also, your choice of figure is likely going to come into play since each newer generation is (on average) going to take up more resources.

I think the best thing to do would be to build a few example scenes that would be typical of the style you are aiming for and see how well they render on your hardware.

If they fallback to CPU rendering more often than not then you'd have to factor in time to optimise each scene. Alternatively, if your VN does well and you start making money then there are rented render services out there that you can take advantage of. I don't know too much about how they work or how easy it would be to queue up a bunch of scenes and have the server churn them out while you sleep but it's an option you can explore if/when you are doing well.

windytwit_13a0b2b43b

As someone who's played (and attempted to make) a VN, there are a few tricks to you can speed up rendering times/reducing the chance of getting a out of VRAM error. I'm someone who is using a GTX 1060 6GB.

I do need to echo which Generation of figure matters, but then I jumped a decade from V4 to G8 last year, a serious difference. I've had scenes where two G8s and a scene break the 5GB* which forces my Pc to go CPU only, in others I've had 3 G8s in a scene running quite happily via GPU.  *Some of the VRAM is used by Windows and many apps, which often means 2GB of my GPU is already eaten up by something that is not DAZ Studio.

Since you'll be doing a lot of renders in the same area with no/little camera movements, One method is that you can make a 360 Photo/HDRI render first of your environment without characters and certain props. Load the HDRI in to the Render settings or environment tab, enable draw dome, and hide the environment, and bring in your characters and props. You're trading diskspace (additional images) for VRAM and Speed. Sorry, I think this would been easier to show then explain. There are some limitations to this method. Anything rendered to HDRI can't be altered (baring photo shop or a new HDRI render), and you can't place any character behind a piece of scenery.

https://www.deviantart.com/bignutter/art/Team-Coffee-Talk-966104786 This scene was not generated with HDRI, as the counter and the props are in front of the characters. This scene even had been work done with the Scene Optimizer tool. I think the Price board is half the resolution of the original, and you but can't tell the difference between the 4000x4000 original vs the 2000x2000 image as the price board is about 600x600. (I think I could have quartered the FG Cafe's 4k assets and still not noticed any quality loss.)

https://www.deviantart.com/bignutter/art/Rachel-936332521 was made using a free HDRI that was made from photographs. This render only took a few minutes, but I hid own the more annoying things is trying to make the character appear that they're standing in the scene, by not rendering below the knee.