Wanting to hit the minimum DAZ requirements with new lappy

RenderPretender

Hi - 

I have increasingly been having issues with my 4G memory (I know, I know) lappy rendering in Iray. It's just randomly deciding not to cooperate, either in the Aux window or regular renders. The lappy just locks up more often than not. I'm not well disposed toward going out and dropping a fortune on some glitzy hot rod to support a mere passtime, so I was wondering if a new, reasonably appointed Windows 10 lappy with at least 8G of RAM will support Iray. Is there a dead-to-rights requirement for Nvidia hardware, or no? I'm looking to get something reasonably servicable for under $500.00. If I can't, I may just have to kiss this hobby goodby.

Thanks for any input.

Edit: Could I get by with something like this or camparable?

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/hp-pavilion-x360-2-in-1-14-touch-screen-laptop-intel-core-i3-8gb-memory-128gb-solid-state-drive-natural-silver-ash-silver-base-and-keyboard-frame/6339312.p?skuId=6339312

It does only have a 128GB flash-based SSD drive, though, instead of a hard drive.

SimonJM

Assuming I am seeing the same thing you are (what I see depnds if I say I am in Canada, US or Mexico, so .. ;))

The good news is that it will run Daz Studio.

The bad news is that it won't be that good for Iray.

Any (pretty much) laptop that will handle Daz Studio and Iray 'well' (and yes, well is a relative term!) will be fairly pricey as mobile components tend to be more expensive as well as less capable than their deskyop cousins.

8GB would be bargain basement for RAM (memory consumption peaks during render and if that happens you can start swapping out to page file, which slows everything down).  The i3 processor is the 'baby' of the family but shoudl still be good enough.  To use Iray with a hope to finsih a render 'any time soon' almost demands a video card that has CUDA capability - meaning an nVidia card of some sort, and we hark back to the mobile versiosn are mor emoney for less spec comment ...  The storage, at 128GB, is a liitle borderline, I'd say - assuming you wanted to do stuff other than Daz Studio as your content will expand to fill all available space if you don't take care!

RenderPretender

SimonJM said:

Assuming I am seeing the same thing you are (what I see depnds if I say I am in Canada, US or Mexico, so .. ;))

The good news is that it will run Daz Studio.

The bad news is that it won't be that good for Iray.

Any (pretty much) laptop that will handle Daz Studio and Iray 'well' (and yes, well is a relative term!) will be fairly pricey as mobile components tend to be more expensive as well as less capable than their deskyop cousins.

8GB would be bargain basement for RAM (memory consumption peaks during render and if that happens you can start swapping out to page file, which slows everything down).  The i3 processor is the 'baby' of the family but shoudl still be good enough.  To use Iray with a hope to finsih a render 'any time soon' almost demands a video card that has CUDA capability - meaning an nVidia card of some sort, and we hark back to the mobile versiosn are mor emoney for less spec comment ...  The storage, at 128GB, is a liitle borderline, I'd say - assuming you wanted to do stuff other than Daz Studio as your content will expand to fill all available space if you don't take care!

Thanks for the detailed reply.

What I can't sort out is that I am now using a lappy with 4 (not upgradable) GB RAM, a 500GB HD, and an external drive that houses all my content and scene files. Up til last night, it was completing renders both in aux preview and final with relatively little difficulty. I was rendering in Iray for 30 minutes to an hour and then running the result through an external denoiser and getting pretty pleasing results for the sort of work I do. Now, however, I'm struggling to get any result at all without a system lockup, and there's no rhyme or reason.

I have used Windows tools to scan both drives and the system memory for errors. Nothing. So I'm stumped and frustrated at this sudden lack of cooperation from a machine that exhibits no obvious issues otherwise. Totally flummoxed at this point.

TheKD

You might get more hardware bang for the buck building a desktop than buying a laptop.

RenderPretender

TheKD said:

You might get more hardware bang for the buck building a desktop than buying a laptop.

Likely, but I guess I'd like to understand the cause of the sudden problem before I start throwing money at what I haven't sorted out.

Quixotry

Have you updated Daz Studio recently or checked that your graphics card drivers up to date? I work on a  Mac, so I tend to see driver updates come out much later than the Windows ones, but sometimes an update to either Daz Studio or my drivers will significantly affect render times. I usually end up rolling back through different driver versions after updating Studio to see which one handles rendering best. Sometimes an older driver actually works better than the newest one, sometimes the new one is best. Just a thought. :)

Takeo.Kensei

masi3vee said:

SimonJM said:

Assuming I am seeing the same thing you are (what I see depnds if I say I am in Canada, US or Mexico, so .. ;))

The good news is that it will run Daz Studio.

The bad news is that it won't be that good for Iray.

Any (pretty much) laptop that will handle Daz Studio and Iray 'well' (and yes, well is a relative term!) will be fairly pricey as mobile components tend to be more expensive as well as less capable than their deskyop cousins.

8GB would be bargain basement for RAM (memory consumption peaks during render and if that happens you can start swapping out to page file, which slows everything down).  The i3 processor is the 'baby' of the family but shoudl still be good enough.  To use Iray with a hope to finsih a render 'any time soon' almost demands a video card that has CUDA capability - meaning an nVidia card of some sort, and we hark back to the mobile versiosn are mor emoney for less spec comment ...  The storage, at 128GB, is a liitle borderline, I'd say - assuming you wanted to do stuff other than Daz Studio as your content will expand to fill all available space if you don't take care!

Thanks for the detailed reply.

What I can't sort out is that I am now using a lappy with 4 (not upgradable) GB RAM, a 500GB HD, and an external drive that houses all my content and scene files. Up til last night, it was completing renders both in aux preview and final with relatively little difficulty. I was rendering in Iray for 30 minutes to an hour and then running the result through an external denoiser and getting pretty pleasing results for the sort of work I do. Now, however, I'm struggling to get any result at all without a system lockup, and there's no rhyme or reason.

I have used Windows tools to scan both drives and the system memory for errors. Nothing. So I'm stumped and frustrated at this sudden lack of cooperation from a machine that exhibits no obvious issues otherwise. Totally flummoxed at this point.

Have you checked temperatures and monitor if fans are OK?

Cleaning the inside from dust once in a while could be a good idea

 

Otherwise, if you want a laptop you won't find anything new that will be good enough for 500$

Check for used gamer notebook with 970m,980m, or 1050 GFX cards (preferably with 4GB Vram)

You can find pretty good ones on ebay that can be good deal if they are functionnal

ex https://www.ebay.com/itm/Lenovo-Y520-Gaming-Laptop-i7-7700HQ-16GB-GeForce-GTX-1050-Ti-256GB-SSD-2TB-HDD/193008372291?hash=item2cf0320a43:g:v2sAAOSwOKldNNZS

nonesuch00

I have a 7 year old laptop 3rd Gen intel i7 with it's integrated HD Graphics 4000 and DAZ Studio 4.11+ is actually improving in how fast it will run on that laptop. Your big problem is you want 16+ GB RAM not 8GB RAM and 256+GB SSD. Personally, I will by upgrading to a self-build desktop with an AMD Ryzen 5 3600G CPU because of the latest versions of Unity for their Asset Store needs it more than DAZ Studio rendering needs it.

So that laptop is good with 16GB and if you improve the SSD included to 256GB or 512GB because I'm have big doubts how long it will be before your 128GB SSD starts running low of free space after a couple of years of Windows 10 upgrades & security patches & upgrades to 3rd party SW you might have which always seems to leave behind prior versions of files that aren't used anymore and such thing like that.

Strictly speaking though, it will run DAZ Studio as you linked above.

RenderPretender

Yes, I have up to date drivers and the lappy sits on a cooling pad.

This seems random, except for one character/scene that locks the machine up tight every time. The resource monitor was at 23% useable memory when it happened last, after three flawless and fast aux port previews of other scenes/characters. Makes absolutely no sense at all.

There are times when I think about going back to 3Delight and using a comic filter, doing pseudo-real sort of stuff. This whole photo-real thing is getting a bit out of control. I need some fresh air...

RenderPretender

After some air, I may have had a little breakthrough. I loaded the scene that's giving me the most trouble, and applied a prior preset (slightly different morphs) of the character to the version of her in the scene, saved the file, and the aux preview went through at about 55 percent usable memory. This suggests to me that there may have been something about the latest version of the character that DAZ or my gear didn't like, even though I had rendered her before. So at least she may be salvageable. Stil weird, though.

RenderPretender

In deference to TK, I'm wondering if this may well have been a thermal issue. I just produced a perfectly acceptable render with the offending character/scene, and the lack of any apparent memory, file or system issues leads me to suspect that my sleep/power settings may have caused some overloading. After changing the settings and watching the resource monitor while running only DAZ while rendering, I am cautiously optimistic. Sucks, though, to have to keep closing and opening my browser and postwork applications. Fingers crossed for now. Thanks to all who offered kind input.

TheKD

If you want, you can use hwinfo as a temp monitor, and you can set up custum alerts in the option panel instead of having to keep looking at it. https://www.hwinfo.com/download/

Drip

masi3vee said:

In deference to TK, I'm wondering if this may well have been a thermal issue. I just produced a perfectly acceptable render with the offending character/scene, and the lack of any apparent memory, file or system issues leads me to suspect that my sleep/power settings may have caused some overloading. After changing the settings and watching the resource monitor while running only DAZ while rendering, I am cautiously optimistic. Sucks, though, to have to keep closing and opening my browser and postwork applications. Fingers crossed for now. Thanks to all who offered kind input.

Well, if you did get it working again, then this might be a good time to start saving up for something slightly beefier. DS does keep getting more complex, and sooner or later, you'll hit the limit of your lappy anyway. With a $500 lappy, you could probably hold out for another 2-3 years. With a $800 desktop or a $1,000 laptop, you could probably last another 4 years and see some improvement to your output as well. Make it a $1,500 desktop, and you'll see a really vast improvement to both your rendering speed and your render quality. If you have a friend or family member willing to assemble a computer for you from components, then he or she could probably shave 30% to 40% off the price as well, or use simply better components.

A supposedly cheap electronics chain around here sells supposedly "high-end" rigs for about 3,000 euros. The total value of the seperate components is barely 1,700 though, and you better doublecheck their rigs carefully, since they still list NVidia 1080's between the 2080.. But, the same thing happens with the low end stuff they're selling.
And that 3,000/1,700 rig? I had a better rig that made more sense and allowed for future upgrades assembled for 1,600. But that does require a lot of investigation and a little tech knowledge.

RenderPretender

Drip said:

masi3vee said:

In deference to TK, I'm wondering if this may well have been a thermal issue. I just produced a perfectly acceptable render with the offending character/scene, and the lack of any apparent memory, file or system issues leads me to suspect that my sleep/power settings may have caused some overloading. After changing the settings and watching the resource monitor while running only DAZ while rendering, I am cautiously optimistic. Sucks, though, to have to keep closing and opening my browser and postwork applications. Fingers crossed for now. Thanks to all who offered kind input.

Well, if you did get it working again, then this might be a good time to start saving up for something slightly beefier. DS does keep getting more complex, and sooner or later, you'll hit the limit of your lappy anyway. With a $500 lappy, you could probably hold out for another 2-3 years. With a $800 desktop or a $1,000 laptop, you could probably last another 4 years and see some improvement to your output as well. Make it a $1,500 desktop, and you'll see a really vast improvement to both your rendering speed and your render quality. If you have a friend or family member willing to assemble a computer for you from components, then he or she could probably shave 30% to 40% off the price as well, or use simply better components.

A supposedly cheap electronics chain around here sells supposedly "high-end" rigs for about 3,000 euros. The total value of the seperate components is barely 1,700 though, and you better doublecheck their rigs carefully, since they still list NVidia 1080's between the 2080.. But, the same thing happens with the low end stuff they're selling.
And that 3,000/1,700 rig? I had a better rig that made more sense and allowed for future upgrades assembled for 1,600. But that does require a lot of investigation and a little tech knowledge.

I think you're almost certainly right, and I appreciate the kind input. At this juncture, I have to keep reminding myself that I'm a hobbyist, and my computer needs generally take a back seat to other priorities. Hence my insistence on squeezing the stone. It's also a matter of priciple. I don't like feeling defeated. :)