GPU render - hit or miss

apolloladdie

Hello,

I have recently udpated my DAZ from 10 to 11. Upon installing 11, DAZ stopped rendering with GPU... Or, it would portentially render once, and then not again. I would restart DAZ, and the same. I would do a RAM memory purge, and the same. It is currently about a 25% chance of rendering via GPU. The requirements for the scenes are less than 2Gb beacuse I know this is not the best computer for rendering, nor is it the worst, but it is what I have.

I have a i7-8750H w/16Gb of RAM, and GTX 1050 Ti w/ 26.21.14.3160 driver installed 7/17/2019.

I have also been browsing the forums for simialar problems, but they all say the same, update your Video Card drivers... Which I have. Twice now.

Any help would be welcome. 

Dim Reaper

Download something to monitor the memory use of your GPU.  GPU-Z is probably the easiest to install and run.  Load it before Daz Studio and click on the Sensors tab.  Keep an eye on the "Memory used" section.  It may be that once you have rendered once with Daz Studio, it is not releasing the memory after you close the render.

Going back to basics, load Daz Studio, create a sphere primative, add a material and then render.  Check the GPU RAM usage.  Close the render window.  Check the GPU RAM usage again.  Render a second time.  Check the GPU RAM usage.  You want to see if the GRAM is released after you close the render window.

If you find that it is rendering the sphere multiple times, start a new scene and add one figure, then repeat the above.

You could also try downloading the beta for DS 10.12.  You will be able to have the Beta and the current 10.11 build on your system, so definitely worth trying the beta to see if you get better results.

fastbike1

That driver number doesn't look like an Nvidia driver, e.g. 430.86

apolloladdie

I attached a screenshot of Video card properties.

I did download  CPU-Z and am currently trying to render a priviously CPU only render. My GPU is rendering the scene @ 3278 of 4096 Mb used (wish I could up that, but it is hard GPU memory). I am going to let it finish and check to see if the used memory drops to the 77mb it was prior to the render.

 

Edit: I let the render finish, and the Memory used did not change. However, when i closed DAZ, the memory was released. DAZ studio seems to be the culprit by not allow the memory to be unloaded. Is there anything I can do to fix this?

RayDAnt

apolloladdie said:

Edit: I let the render finish, and the Memory used did not change. However, when i closed DAZ, the memory was released. DAZ studio seems to be the culprit by not allow the memory to be unloaded. Is there anything I can do to fix this?

Are you completely closing (either by clicking the X in the corner or by saving the final image somewhere) the preview window each and every time you initiate a render? Technically each of those windows has a whole separate Iray instance running behind it complete with redundant vram memory usage. Meaning that if you are in the habit of leaving previous render preview windows open (eg. to compare slight visual tweaks on the same render at low iteration stages) you will run out of vram in no time.

 

ETA:

Also - for those wondering -  26.21.14.3160 in mainstream Nvidia driver nomecleture translates to 431.60 (you just truncate everything but the last five digits.)

apolloladdie

I rarely hit the X, but I do CLOSE the windows if I am unhappy with the render. If I am happy, and want to save, I do just that. I have made that a habbit because prior to getting my Dell G7, my last computer would hang up if I did not do that. So, I have gotten in the habbit out of nessessity rather than desire.

BTW: you mention VRAM. I did not think the GPU would use allocated VRAM. It would only use dedicated GPU RAM. Or am I mistaken and can boost my VRAM allocation for the GPU.

TheKD

VRAM means memory build into the vidoe card. Man I wish we could just slap more vram sticks on cards like we can regular RAM lol.

RayDAnt

apolloladdie said:

BTW: you mention VRAM. I did not think the GPU would use allocated VRAM. It would only use dedicated GPU RAM. Or am I mistaken and can boost my VRAM allocation for the GPU.

VRAM is short for Video RAM - as in RAM on the GPU.

Virtual memory would be shortened as VMEM.

apolloladdie

Ahh, that is where I was mistaken. VRAM for me has always been Virtual RAM. 

Dim Reaper

fastbike1 said:

That driver number doesn't look like an Nvidia driver, e.g. 430.86

26.21.14.3160 is another way that nVidia display their driver version.  You can see it from the last few numbers - 341.60.  No idea why they display it two ways.

 

EDIT: Just seen that RayDAnt said the same thing.

 

 

Dim Reaper

apolloladdie said:

I attached a screenshot of Video card properties.

I did download  CPU-Z and am currently trying to render a priviously CPU only render. My GPU is rendering the scene @ 3278 of 4096 Mb used (wish I could up that, but it is hard GPU memory). I am going to let it finish and check to see if the used memory drops to the 77mb it was prior to the render.

 

Edit: I let the render finish, and the Memory used did not change. However, when i closed DAZ, the memory was released. DAZ studio seems to be the culprit by not allow the memory to be unloaded. Is there anything I can do to fix this?

To get more information on what is happening, you need to run a much simpler scene, closing the render window after each render and then render again and again and checking if the VRAM is released after you close the render window.

I find often that Daz Studio tends to stay resident for a while after closing.  When I'm working on a big scene with lots of tweaks, I'll eventually save, close DS, open taskmanager and manually close DS from there before reloading and continuing.