High CPU usage
Keiron
Posts: 413
Just in case you have High Iray Render times and perhaps a sluggish PC, this may or may not be of help to you
The times I was getting to render a 1920 x 1080 image was taking forever
I also found out a few Iray settings that caused some problems
this is what I found
I have 4 drives installed, the C and G drives are both SSD, so you would hope and expect them to be faster that the normal drives
When I open up task manager, I noticed the drive % was around 22 to 25% this is missleading, as that is the % across all drives
When I checked each drive I noticed Drive 0 was nearly always around 98%
Checking on the internet there were a couple of services that you can stop, but this didn't work
So I stopped and started each running service in turn until the problem stopped and restarted
It was the Advanced System Care 10 App. I have now disabled this for now, but have reported the problem to them
The other problem's were in the Iray settings advanced tab
I have a quad i7 and 2 geforce 970 installed set up in SLI
I had enabled cpu and gpu 1 and 2
Big problem as it was writing to a busy disc0 render times > 8 min
First I disabled CPU on both Render options photoreal and interactive, render times reduced to 4 min to 5 mins in photo real option with Advanced System Care 10, killing drive 0
Running both Geforce GPU's with Advanced System Care disabled 4 mins 12 seconds
Running both Geforce GPU's and the quad i7 CPU's render times with Advanced System Care disabled 4 min 14 seconds LOL slower. Disc 0 traffic was low through out render
I was rendering to disc 3 the other SSD drive
I bought the program to reduce texture sizes etc but it didn't make any difference NSS LOL I'll try again now Drive 0 isn't running at100%
Another weard problem to be aware off, I tried using the Interactive settings and got a black render? Why cos I had disabled CPU and enabled both GPU's. for some reason Studio doesn't use the GPU's in this configuration. Enabling CPU corrected the black render problem
Just out of interest the quad cpu's run at 100% when cpu is enabled and are now runing around 40% with cpu disabled
Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
224 S 200 W, Suite #250
Salt Lake City, UT 84101
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2024 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
You shouldn't be rendering in Iray with SLI. NVidia recommends disabling / not connecting SLI for iray
hi ill try that too, but as i said it was drive 0 running at 100% that was the issue
Thank you for the info on sli I'll disable itupdate
Disabled SLI, rendered same scene 4 min 14 seconds made no difference to IRAY render time, i'll leave it as is for now
Ill try reducing texture sizes next
4 mins is pretty good. What are you rendering?
Hi
The internal mech of a Grand Piano, in the example render times above it was a front on render of the grand piano showing all the keys in direct light
Some camera angles take a much longer time, especially if it's indirect light but the shadow effects can be amazing
Just out of interest, here is a couple of renders that stopped on their own within the parameters that i have set. render time around 4 minutes, however with the C drive at max they didn't complete. I also noticed the same problem occuring when a Windows update occured.
Here are a few more complex scenes that are being stopped by a time limit of eight minutes, so they do not complete, but are using the same parameter settings. As it's a Video I'm making compromises, but hopefully it should look reasonable. I have reduced the texture sizes by 4, but again I can't see much improvement in speed so far. I am however getting fairly good results in the renders. One very obvious problem is dark colours, as they can look speckled
I'm a bit confused about why your HD utilisation is so high. This isn't an area I know much about, but from what I could tell my HD utilisation was low when I just ran a test with multiple genesis figures in an interior scene. Your original post is a bit confusing. You're running CPU usage and HD in together and it seems you are conflating the two, though I'm not sure if that's what you mean.
As to reducing texture sizes, it apears, from the images provided, you aren't using any. All the surfaces seem to be represented as texturless shaders. The difference in render convergence times is probably simply down to the complexity of scenes and how light is bounced and calculated. As you said, some of the scenes rely more on indirect lighting. That will always take longer to render.
Hi
Just to Clarify
Disc 0 ie the SSD C drive that Daz Studio 4.9 is installed it was running at Max, IE something was writing and reading from it, I thought this was due to the rendering the scene initially, but when I stopped the rendering the C drive still stayed at Max utilisation.
I discovered there was a Windows update that was writing data to this Disc so I waited for this to complete and rebooted the PC a few times, On checking the C again it was still at Max
Next I looked into the Task Manager again to see if I could see what was causing the issue, nothing obvious was seen, so I looked on the interent for a solution, it was indicated that a couple of services may be causing the issue Windows Search and Super fetch these were stopped but no change
I then Stopped the Advanced System Care 10 Service and the C Drive utilisation fell from 100% to 4% note the AV and Malware parts were still running, but it looked like the online web protection had stopped Note there was no AV scan in progress
Over the Last week I had been getting slow render times > 8 minutes. So I tried it again with the drive now not at 100% it rendered the same scene in around 4 minutes
I have also now set the renders to output to the second SSD drive
I then tried rendering with the different setting in the Advanced tab with the CPU enabled using Photoreal all cores were running at 100% making it difficult to use the PC, the utilisation on the C drive was now only 4% so I then disabled the CPU setting but left both of the GPU's enabled the cores utilsations dropped to around 40% it was rendering fine now still at around 4 minutes for the same scene.
So in short the high utilisation of the C drive was affecting the performance of Daz Studio significantly. I might also re install Daz Studio onto the second SSD drive so its not affected by other windows programs
Re the textures I added a number of Iray textures to many surfaces gold, felt, leather etc , using the program it showed me some textures were about 4000, 2500 and 1024 so using the program I reduced these by 4, saved the scene, closed down Studio and reopend tried to render the same scene again but didnt see much of an improvement in render time
re the lighting and complexity of the scene does have a big effect on render times, im not sure how Daz Studio deals with the objects in a scene when rendering
Ah, I see and understand much better now. And yes, I think it is wise to leave CPU rendering disabled if you have the right graphics cards, though I've noticed my system gets a bit sluggish while rendering on both cards sometimes.
As I also mentioned I disabled the CPU on the Interactive left the GPU's on and got a black render LOL
I ran the MSI Afterburner prog that showed me the GPU's wern't being used in this config only the CPU is used
I also checked using MSI afterburner that when rendering with Photoreal that CPU and GPU's are used when enabled
Happy Rendering LOL
The CPU should always have some usage while Iray is working, that's just the nature of the beast. At least that's how it works on my configuration.
Yes indeed
Well have fun, Ill post the Video in a few months after it's finished it's at 3380 frames at the moment LOL
How many frames total? Good luck!
hi 12000 but i will stop around 6000 lol
Hi
Thankyou to ATI for the following info
Bring up the task manager (ctrl+alt+del, then choose Task Manager), go to "Details", select the Daz program, right click, choose "Set affinity", and uncheck some of the CPU threads. Unchecking one will make the system a lot more responsive, unchecking two will let you browse, use the net, as if there was no rendering going on.
So In conclusion
I'm using 2 x Geforce 970 for rendering quad 17 and 16 gig memory
It's recomended that SLI is disabled although I have tried both and both seem to work OK
For Photoreal renders I have set Daz Studio to not use the CPU, but I have enabled the GPU's for each Geforce 970 card
In addition Daz Studio need's some CPU to work, so looking at the Task Manager at least 4 out of the 8 threads are needed, so I have unchecked 4 of the CPU threads, the PC is now perfectly usable for normal use. whilst its rendering
To Improve render times I have done the following
Made sure there is plenty of light in the scene
After quite a few test renders i'm accepting a limit of 400 iterations per Image which looks reasonably good at 1920 x 1080
I've set the Max time to 6 mins
fstop is at 2.5
ISO is set to 50
Shutter is set to 200
There is no doubt that what's in the scene affects the render time a lot
Using the Scene Optimisation script I've reduced the textures by 4 saved and reloaded the scene its now using a lot less memory than before
At this point the render doesn't complete the default time out shut's down the rending
I would like to say at this point it would be great, if Daz Studio would only render what's showing in the scene, cos it looks like it will try and render all the objects in the scene
I then in the Scene Tab, hid all the objects that were there but not in the scene
Massive difference
The rendering is now stopping due to the Iteration settings not the time out
So although it's around 5 min to complete a render upto 400 Iterations its looks reasonably good
Another important factor is dark colours seem to need more iterations that light ones
Something I don't understand, is in the Scene Optimisation script, I have some objects with a zero size, these do have textures?
Perhaps this script can be enhanced calculate what objects are in the scene and make the others invisible in one hit
Here is the render at 5 minutes using the above settings
Another handy tip I picked up yesterday (in the DAZ Studio sub forum) was to set DAZ Studio's priority (just above affinity) to below normal. Works nicely.
Great point Jim
Happy rendering
my problem is a bit different but still is on the same wheel house. when i render, it overruns the CPU. It causes netflix to run really slow & my music from youtube to start tweaking out and running slowly. I have an AMD 8 core possessor, a gforce GTX 1660 with 6 gig on vid card and 32 gigs of ram on main board. This desn't happen when i use any other program. Is there a way to limit Daz studios cpu usage to like 75% max when rendoring? Any advice would help I am trying to learn Daz studio after 2 decades of using poser.
Go into advbanced rendering and disable the CPU. If you continue to have issues with high CPU usage your scenes are too big for the graphic card.
To limit CPU use uu need the Set Affinity feature, which lets you uncheck CPU cores/threads. It's launched from the etails tab by right-click on the application, but it has to be done each time you use the application; there is a way to create a batch file to launch with pre-determined affitnity setting but as I recall it has to be run in administrator mode, which may mean DS tries to launch in admin mode and it will then refuse.