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As has been stated before, the amount of RAM used during CPU render is in no way an indicator of how much VRAM you will need for a GPU render. The amount of VRAM needed is normally much lower than this. I have seen Daz Studio hit over 12GB during iRay rendering, but the scene I was rendering fitted comfortably into my 4GB of VRAM.
you would need to check with the laptop manufacturer. there are several 970Ms with different RAM configs depending on the OEM.
did it ever show 6GB?
You might want to be clearer about that in future. The blanket 'Iray is impossible/useless unless you have a $6k+ rig' is wildly misleading for lots of people.
Heck, I've had reasonable results with portraits and small scenes. It's only larger stuff where I hit a problem, and even then, it depends a LOT on the scene.
Well, all you need to accommodate your system for an nVidia GPU would be a Mobo/CPU replacement for the most part unless you have a mid-sized case that is...
But yeah, I agree with you with the portraits, as I usually steer towards entire scenes and my CPU drains at least 13gb (Though I have 32gb available) so looking forward to my 1080 when it ships! BTW, just came from your gallery, and I hate myself for not going to it earlier!
When gamming in Skyrim, ENB.308 reports 4GB available yet when rendering in Iray I have seen VRAM exceed 5GB so it would seem to depend on the application
That being said, this is still a lot better then what I ran into with ATI. Using the Catalyst 12 drivers my 5870 ran Skyrim at 60 FPS at high settings and no ENB graphics mod. BUT when I installed the catalyst 13 drivers, my FPS was cut in half for no reason. I found out it happens a lot with thier cards, grandfathering them via drivers.
The GTX 970 absolutely does have 4 gb of memory. The issue is that not all of that memory is equal. The first 3.5 gb works like you would expect, but the last 0.5 gb is a bit slower to access. This can effect certain video games that need more than 3.5 gb to run. But for Daz this difference is not noticeable at all in testing, even if a scene is using more than 3.5 gb. So Daz users have nothing to worry. Still, if you bought the card, you can get a $30 refund, so hooray!
(not quoting as the function is buggered in the mobile app. ...@ William, as you know I create some "epic" sized scenes. I also render in large format so texture quality is very important. If Daz included a function to change the size of texture maps within the programme (rather than having to do so in a 2D programme) I would be more prone to do so to conserve memory.
@ Takezo_3001, I am on a fixed income and thus unable to afford building a new system which I would need to do to accomodate even the Maxwell generation GPUs. My system is built on four year old tech (first gen i7 with DDR3 tri channel memory and PCI 2.0). This is why I am stuck rendering in the CPU/virtual memory slow lane.
How much RAM do you have? Have you ever thought of animating in Unity 3D? 16GB is enough for most scenes. Even though it is a game engine if you don't publish a game you don't need to buy a game development license. And while the animation frames won't be near as high a quality as an iRay animation frame from DAZ Studio if you choose the right textures, right lighting, right models, and mixed baked lighting with realtime lighting you can can some pretty nice clips. Also the mix between 'game optimized animation techniques' and 'game optimized physics models' is pretty solid now and based on nVidia physX (3.1 now I believe).
Also, and this is true for DAZ Studio or Unity or any animation package you choose, you may download many free looped animations to use for your animations from Mixamor.com free. There are also many free models, enviroments and characters, in the Unity Asset Store to combine with DAZ models.
Something to think about as creating even a short 4K iRay animated clip is really not an option in DAZ Studio or any other animation package I know of at the consumer level.
Considering his PC has just a PCIe 2.0 slot, that's a pretty old motherboard that is unlikely to support 16gb of ram. Maybe 6-8, 12 at most.
Even with such an old system, a newer GPU would still be a massive upgrade, and work well enough in 2.0 slot. Sure, there may be a bottleneck in the memory, but even so it would stilll offer a huge increase in render speed, and for the purposes of Daz, I doubt it there would even be a bottleneck. Deals on the 970 are going crazy, you can find them for $200 brand new in some of these fire sales.
Also, Unity animation not as high quality as Iray animation?
That video is running at 1440P, and looks drop dead gorgeous. It does conviently avoid showing human skin, but look at that lighting, look at the effects. All in real time. It would probably take Iray about a year to render this video at 1440P. And that's being modest. Unity can render it on the fly. As gaming tech moves ever forward, Iray doesn't seem to be advancing nearly as fast. Give it a couple years at most and it will be better to render both animated and still image scenes in a game engine than Daz Iray. It will look just as good but render in a tiny fraction of the time. IMO, Iray is running on borrowed time unless a drastic innovation changes things.
Oh, and to seperate paragraphs on mobile...use these at the end of each paragraph <p> </p> (I hope that shows up right in the post.) Its time consuming, but on mobile its the only way to write on these ancient outdated forums. I'm not sure how Daz thinks having a forum stuck in 2005 gives customers confidence they have cutting edge 3D products...but whatever. I mean, if this was a farming website I'd give it a pass. But as a 3D technology software company, having these old outdated forums is not a good look. Just my 2¢.
I have this card. How do we get our $30?
Well I'm not knowledgeable enough to know the difference between an iray Renderer and a PBR/PBS shader. Logically I think that having PBR shaders in your environment that are utilized makes that environment the similar equivalent to iRay.
So Unity can do extremely advanced PBR/PBS lighting and shading although I'm hestitant to call it realistic. The machines that did that though are outside my budget & I'm guessing Kyoto Kid's and your budget. Maybe from Kendall Sear's talking about his HW his HW could do that Unity scene.
Unity in the Asset Store actually has several advancing shader and lighting scenes in their Asset Store (Blacksmith / Viking / Commander Charles as they call him) that will test you're machine's capabilities pretty quick. I have a 2nd gen 2 CPU (4 thread) i5 with Intel HD Graphics 3000 & 16GB RAM and while it can run them the computer gets hammered and is unusable running those (I have to go through & turn off shadows on a bunch of corridor lighting for example).
What I can do in Unity those is pretty easily create toon, claymation, and I'd call them '3DL similar equivalent' scenes on my computer quite easily. The main thing is you have to avoid more than 1 source generated realtime time shadows and windzones and a few other advanced HW/SW features. I've only create short games so far but the capability is there to create animations and in fact besides Unity's animations, a Japanese company has create Disney style claymation (Frozen / Toy Story) style animations. There is also a animation made a couple years back of a man that runs of of milk and proceeds to have a slapstick adventure but that one's resources were never realised to the public. It has a nice look, like say a DAZ caricatured look that might be possible on a computer on mine scaled back in scope & size.
If Koyoto Kid's computer can only do 8GB or 12GB RAM then Unity can do that too but trying to baked shadows won't work so well for large scenes.
Also 8GB, 12GB, or 16GB if I try to run DAZ Studio while rendering & Unity at the same time I get a video driver crash, that might not be the case though for those that have AMD or nVidia video cards.
....my main system only has 12 GB. When I built it I had Win7 Home so to expand to 24 GB (as the memory is configured in tri channel mode) I would also need to find an OEM of Win7 Pro. Unfortunately I am on a really tight fixed budget right now and cannot even afford those upgrades let alone a new system to support the Pascal generation GPUs.
I also really have little interest in animating nyway as I's have to find voice talent, get lip synch software, etc.
Oh, back home now and fixed the formatting of the original post. Just have to remember when on the mobile to keep things short.
...the 970 doesn't have enough memory for the sizes of scenes I usually create. I don't use procedural shaders since I like having defined textures (after all why use Iray if you are not going for a more realistic look?) and that eats up a lot of memory.
When I render in CPU mode, large scenes tend to go into Virtual Memory which slows things down even more.
As to the flags, I never see those when I'm on my mobile device and there is no way to switch modes like there is in the full version (I can't even get the worthless spell check to run).
The video is impressive however, in some actual human renders I have seen, the characters tend to look more "game like" because of the skin textures. Considering my story is predominantly about humans, that is why I have reservations. I have also spent a lot of time refining skin textures in Iray.
Also as I mentioned above, I really have little interest in animation
I would check the Nvidia site first. Wouldn't be surprised if the refund was fairly obscure.
kk: I want to apologize for some of my very very indirect eyerolling in your direction. After experimenting more with Iray and seeing the difference procedural shaders make... yeah, you are totally right.
If you want to make scenes relying on a lot of texture maps, which means most conventional scenes involving more than one or two people and decent environments, Iray requires REALLY heavy GPU investment, or possibly a CPU-driven approach that, again, means a very high end machine.
Now, I think there's a lot of interesting room for procedural approaches, but you are right that stuff with a lot of human figures is going to suffer. I'm getting decent results with procedural stuff, but it's always going to be not quite as good as mapped.
Well based in what you said interests you & your scenes I'm not sure anything less than a machine with 32GB system RAM and an nVidia card with 16GB RAM is going to be capble enough. The system with 32GB RAM you can build yourself easiliy enough for less than $1000 and probably less than $600 depending on what you already have on hand but these 16GB nVidia video cards I can't actually find one for sale. The largest RAM size I can find is on GTX Titan Z with 12GB RAM and the price is through the roof.
When it comes down to it a CPU render with 32GB RAM is as good as a nVidia video card GPU render with 16GB RAM - you just have to wait for it longer.
I'd be kind of curious if there's a breakpoint where video card expense will be high enough such that you'd get the same speed from putting most of that money into the CPU/base computer itself.
Well the cheapest cost for that Titan Z was twice the price of building a 6th Gen i7 Quad Core (with a bit of shopping around).
Maybe Kendall Sears knows of PC backplanes that you can plug a bunch of intel CPUs into to run in parallel but I don't know of any. I don't thing I could afford them anyway.
I'm not sure what architecture to search for...Xeon? Or what? Are there even 6th Gen intel i7 Xeons?
I have no idea if the curves for prices of motherboard/cpu and GPU converge, stay parallel, or what. I suspect if they do converge it's above what I could afford, but I'm idly curious. ;)
This was a big surprise to me. You just put them in regular PC PCI slots and, eg, windup with a Xeon coporocessor board with 61 cores. It will set you back $1700 though.
https://smile.amazon.com/Intel-Xeon-Phi-7120P-Coprocessor/dp/B00FKG9R2Q/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1471016560&sr=8-1&keywords=intel+xeon+phi+cpu
I'm pretty sure if you were a big animation house it's those you'd use and not the video cards. I bet Kendall Sears knows.
The way tech has such short product life cycles I suppose a middle class hobbiest could affordable buy that tech in a few years when it was resold to make room for new tech.
That's been true for a looong time. I've always made a point of buying tech that's at least 1 year from cutting edge, if not longer, because there's a huge drop in price when you aren't pushing things.
...actually a Titan-X. The Titan-Z was a dual 6 GB card so you only had 6 GB for rendering at a price of over 1,500$. it's only advantage was double the CUDA cores compared to a standard Titan.
My system is capable of supporting 24GB of memory but like I said, I need to get an OEM of Win7 Pro to break the 16 GB barrier and be able to use Tri instead of Dual Channel memory. My MB has 6 memory slots and the BIOS supports Tri Channel configuration. As the MB only supports PCI 2.0, I am stuck to the Fermi and Kepler architecture cards, of which (save or the original, expensive, Titan) none have more than 4 GB.
There will be a 16 GB card soon but it is in the professional Quadro line (P5000). The M5200 which had 8 GB retailed for 2,500$, so I would expect maybe 3,000$ for the Pascal version.
...and it still has GDDR5, not HBM 2 memory.
The only way I could ever hope to build a new system is win the Lotto as I am on a tight fixed income.
...processing threads are the issue. The best you can get CPU wise currently is an 18 core (36 thread) Xeon which costs more than a Quadro M5000 that has 8 GB memory and 2048 CUDA cores. The most you can mount on an MB is 2 so for nearly 6,000$ you get 72 threads at 2.3GHx clock speed. Better off with dual Quadro M5000s. or better yet, four Titan X's which would give you nearly 2,000$ in change).
Well, to download Windows 7 free you just need a product key, even an OEM product key is enough:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows7
Windows 7 can still be bought:
https://smile.amazon.com/Microsoft-Windows-Professional-sofware-keycode/dp/B005G0QTAE/ref=sr_1_1?s=software&ie=UTF8&qid=1471068985&sr=1-1&keywords=windows+7
Or can be had for free via BizSpark:
I joined BizSpark years ago intending to publish a game to the Windows Store but still haven't published a game to their store yet although I'm getting closer. However, you can still join BizSpark if you are in trying to start other type of small business, not just game & app publishing. From BizSpark you can get via MSDN a free Windows 7 activation key and also download the ISO. Just because most small businesses fail isn't a reason not to take avantage of opportunity given by big business like Microsoft to fail having ultimately lost less money at the end.
The first will only get me another DL of W7 Home edition.
Leery of Amazon, had someone I know get burned buying a system from there. I also question the legitemacy of licencing for used OS's.
An OEM of W7 Pro at Newegg (whom I trust much more as I've never had a raw deal with them) is 139$
As I am not a start up company, BizSpark is of no use.