Digital Art Zone

HI
I’ve been a big fan of DAZ for years and have been learning and playing with version 3.2 for a while. It got to the point where it was fun and easy but I was pushing my old video card and 2 gig of Ram to the limits. I’m no expert on computer stuff but I knew I needed more. A good friend who is one of those computer savy guys hooked me up with a new GeForce GTX560 video card, upped me to 8 gig of Ram and I installed windows 7 64 bit. Now I’m still struggling with the new format of Daz 4 Pro (Downloaded the 64 bit version today), but I figure I’ll get used to it eventually. (Daz 3 was like an old buddy. I miss it!) My question would be, what can I do to set up my system and Daz studio to get the most out of my new stuff. I’d like to make renders go faster and eventually get into the animation.
Suggestions?
Thanks everyone.

sarge74 - 15 July 2012 12:14 AM

HI
I’ve been a big fan of DAZ for years and have been learning and playing with version 3.2 for a while. It got to the point where it was fun and easy but I was pushing my old video card and 2 gig of Ram to the limits. I’m no expert on computer stuff but I knew I needed more. A good friend who is one of those computer savy guys hooked me up with a new GeForce GTX560 video card, upped me to 8 gig of Ram and I installed windows 7 64 bit. Now I’m still struggling with the new format of Daz 4 Pro (Downloaded the 64 bit version today), but I figure I’ll get used to it eventually. (Daz 3 was like an old buddy. I miss it!) My question would be, what can I do to set up my system and Daz studio to get the most out of my new stuff. I’d like to make renders go faster and eventually get into the animation.
Suggestions?
Thanks everyone.

The way I understand it, DS3.2 and DS4.x are loaded in 2 different directorys.
So you can have and run both on the same system at the same time. So why give up an old friend? 
Just set up DS 3.2 on the new system exactly the way you had it on the old system and get back to making art.
On a faster system it will just fly!  At the same time you can play around with DS 4.x until you are up to speed.
And they can share external runtimes,  I try to keep my content segregated, if it wasn’t made by DAZ, it goes in an external runtime.

Well i guess I’ve heard all these amazing things about going 64 bit Daz 4 so figured its the way to go. Although I have made all these upgrades, I didn’t add storage to my machine so adding a another Daz would eat up alot. So I’ll get to know Daz 4.
I have noticed though while viewing my Task Manager that durring an intensive render with two shadow maps going and a reflection, that my system tops out at a 100% while only using 3-4 gig of Ram. I have 8 so why isn’t the machine using more of that?

The amount of RAM depends on how much is in the scene you’re rendering—as long as you have enough, using more RAM doesn’t speed up the render process.  By default it will use all your CPU—you can set affinities so that DS will only use some of the cores.

Thanks for the input. Sorry, like I said I’m not terribly intelligent on the tech stuff. So what can I do if anything yo speed up my render time and hopefully soon, animations?

Faster CPU with multi cores comes to mind, but that would mean a new mother board also. Sometimes it’s just cheaper to build a new PC from parts than try to push an older PC as far as it will go.