Renders taking much longer than expected
Tojiro
Posts: 61
So I'm trying to make the jump from Poser 11 to Daz3d and I think I'm getting the hang of it but one thing that's really roadblocking me is the render length time. I usually render single images and Poser will do one image, 3-5 lights, 1 set, many props, 1-3 figures at 6000x6000 resolution in about an hour.
Daz3d...I booted it up, loaded one G8 figure and MAT, used the default lighting with no background or other props or figures and using Iray it took 35+ minutes to complete a 1000x750 image. I watched tutorials about cutting down the times, including cutting Max Samples to 1000, lowering Max light path length, turning off "Render Quality Enable" and even deleting all lights to just have one point light, but nothing seems to have any difference. I tried using the 3dDelight engine and it was faster but the render came out looking quite cartoony. Both CPU and GPU boxes are checked.
Just to repeat, this is one G8 figure with nothing else in the scene and using default lighting. I love how Iray looks but I don't think I could use it if it takes days instead of hours to render something... What is going on?
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Comments
Just a bare figure, no hair or clothes? That does sound slow.
Post your Hardware specs and what Operating syste.
Sure, it's a i7-4770k with 16 GB RAM with a GeForce GTX770 using Win 10.
And I sort of found one thing. There were no clothes, but I did put this https://www.daz3d.com/linda-ponytail-hair-for-genesis-3-and-8-female-s on her. So I tried deleting that and that made it marginally better, from 30+ minutes to 10 minutes (which still seems kind of long for a super basic render). Is there something with the hair that could be slowing everything down? When it renders her hair, it comes out rather....grainy? Noisy? Sandy? A sample is below and it might look like a compression artifact but it looks like that right after the render. But I guess that's another problem and the render time is the bigger issue. All settings are still at default.
Do you use GPU-Z to see if your render is kicking over to CPU? If it does, could be the size you're rendering at. One thing I use is Scene Optimizer. You can use the scripts to lower the resolution on selected textures and geometry.
I just downloaded that and it says that GPU load is at 100%. Does that mean that the CPU isn't doing any of the work? How would I check that?
Under "Photoreal" & "Interactive" devices, they are both checked...
GPU Load 100% would mean it was working flat out.
The problem is that your scene has to fit completely onto your card's VRam. If the scene is any larger, it will go from GPU back to CPU rendering, and that will be a lot slower. The GTX 770 has 2GB of RAM (unless you have a version that has more), and that means that you'll have trouble fitting one person on the card, i.e. if you have fibermesh hair and HD, and plenty of normal maps.
I don't know if you already have switched on "Optix Prime Acceleration", that might help a bit. Also, I'd switch off the CPU rendering, as it usually doesn't help a lot with the card (I had a GTX 660 before I got a 980Ti, and it was faster without CPU). This thread might help you compare your system with other systems: https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/53771/iray-starter-scene-post-your-benchmarks/p1
Also, a word of warning, 6000x6000 will render ages if you have an indoor scene.
OOT hairs use 4k maps and tend to have a lot of surfaces. This will take a lot of your video card ram just for the hair.
Sounds like you're going over the GPU's ram and it's kicking back to CPU only rendering.
It will automatically do this regardless if the CPU option is checked or unchecked in Render settings.
Pull up a Task Manager(Windows), CTRL+SHIFT+ESC, and see what it shows when you are rendering.
If it's reaching 100%, with the CPU option unchecked in Render settings, then you're exceeding the available ram of the GPU.
You will get some usage from the cpu while rendering in GPU only mode, but it shouldn't get anywhere near 100%,
GPU-z note.
In some recent testing i've been doing, GPU-Z doesn't always report correct information regarding GPU usage, ram and % utilization especially, while rendering with IRAY, Daz or standalone.
nvidia-smi is a bit more accurate.
It's located in the c:\program files\NVIDIA corporation\NVSMI
It's a command line interface tool, so if you're not used to using CMD you'll need to look that up.
GTX-770 note
I'd suggest switching over to the cpu's onboard graphics chip, if an option, when you want to render with the 770.
(yes i know intel hd graphics stink)
Even if it only has 2GB of ram, you can do some simple scenes with it.
You'll have to play around to see what the max is, but i can usually get at least one clothed character within 2GB of GPU ram, on default settings.
Hmm thanks for the feedback everyone... It looks like the render is using all of the GPU, and CPU usage goes up to 30% when I have just GPU selected. I tried that benchmarking scene and I got to 95% in 20 minutes before I cancelled out. I think perhaps I'll have to stick with Poser until I get a new GPU.