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Video card settings and memory

ChoppskiChoppski Posts: 441
in Daz Studio Discussion

I have a couple of questions. I have been usind DS4.10 for a while, and things are generally fine, but recently it seems I am having memory issues. single figures with hair and sometimes body hair that I have saved are reloading and the memory used by the program is really large. Usually, once tdl make has run, if I do a spot render the memory goes higher and then the load reduces sometimes by half. THis concerns me because I sometimes find it really difficult to load more than two, somtimes more than one, saved figure.

A friend recommended that I change my video card settings so that my dedicated nvidia card is set for DS. I can do that, but I have my concerns. My nvidia card is only 2gb. Often the memory requirements seem higher than that. My friend said, though, that integrated cards use the memory of the system not their own memory.

My questions are these--1. is it ok to use the nvidia card solely and will/should that make a difference?

2. I use both iray and 3dl, but with iray I have it set to render without the nvida card, with cpu, because my card has so little memory. Will it be ok to keep it like that if I make the dedicated card my hardware setting?

3. I have run tests on my memory and they say I am fine. Are there other optimizations for helping with memory? I will look into whether my computer's memory (currently 8 GB) can be expanded. I htink it can. I presume that should help?

Comments

  • Richard HaseltineRichard Haseltine Posts: 97,175

    1. the GPU will be used only at render time, if rendering in Iray, or while running a dForce simulation - assuming that those are set to use the GPU. Unless you haev Iray preview mode on the GPU is not greatly used in scene loading (just enough for the OpenGL display, which you can control in Edit>Preferences>Interface)

    2. Yes

    3. I doubt this is a hardware issue - more likely you have a lot more morphs for the figure, which have to be read in (to learn the links) even though the actual deltas (the changes in vertex position, which make up the bulk of each morph file, are not kept in memory until needed).

  • ChoppskiChoppski Posts: 441
    Richard Haseltine said:

    1. the GPU will be used only at render time, if rendering in Iray, or while running a dForce simulation - assuming that those are set to use the GPU. Unless you haev Iray preview mode on the GPU is not greatly used in scene loading (just enough for the OpenGL display, which you can control in Edit>Preferences>Interface)

    2. Yes

    3. I doubt this is a hardware issue - more likely you have a lot more morphs for the figure, which have to be read in (to learn the links) even though the actual deltas (the changes in vertex position, which make up the bulk of each morph file, are not kept in memory until needed).

    That is what I assumed. That and texture size. I can use a highly morphed m7 or m8 with an older m4 texture and the memory load is much less. I can also try scene optimizer which I bought but haven't used.

    I guess my real question is, though, is my friend's idea correct--i.e., that having hardware set to auto or integrated (I have both nvidia and intel as graphics) will use twice the memory than having it set to a dedicated card?

  • ChoppskiChoppski Posts: 441

    For what it is worth I switched from Auto in the Nvidia settings, to the Nvidia card, and it made no discernible difference in the memory usage.

  • DrNewcensteinDrNewcenstein Posts: 816

    I've been using G2 figures heavily, and things run smoothly until I've got about 6 of them with clothes and hair in a scene. As soon as I add one G3/G8 figure, it gets slow. At first I thought I was "one toke over the line", since I'm using a desktop with an i7-4770 with 32GB RAM and a 12GB Titan X (Pascal) GPU, so I did a new scene with just 2 G3/G8 figures and it was noticeably slower than the scene full of G2Fs. I've got 42 character packs for G2F, plus the G2F head and body morphs, Fit Control, Breast Control, etc and maybe 5 total figures for G3/G8 and not the breast control or fit controls, so I don't know if it's purely a question of loaded morphs; it could just be your laptop can't handle G3/G8 figures.

    If your laptop has a Thunderbolt port, you may be able to add an external GPU to help with rendering, but I think some laptop TB ports are somehow rigged for display only.

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