Finally dawned on me why my renders are so slow...
comixfana
Posts: 277
Learning every day...while I have a performant PC (corei7 processor, 16G of RAM) I couldn't figure out why simple renders took over an hour to complete, the last one took all night to complete- 2 characters in a bedroom setting. Then I asked myself "what are the minimum requirements for DAZ Studio?" this is where my video card is serioudsly lacking: minimum requirements for the video card is 4 Gb's my current card only has 1!
And the renderings are still pretty decent, they're just slow to complete. Got an upgrade on the way from Amazon...I wanted to go for a full 8Gb's but budget restrictions limit me to the minimum requirement of 4Gb...can't be any worse that my current viceo card!
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Comments
It could have no effect at all. Did you buy a GTX or RTX card? Which model did you buy?
The trick with GPU renders is that the scene needs to fit inside of the memory of the (Nvidia) graphics card. It may be possible to build a scene that might fit in a 1GB graphics card, but it wouldn't be much of a scene these days.
4GB is still a bit low, but as long as you keep your scenes fairly simple, and keep your texture sizes down, you may be able to utilize the card for such scenes, assuming that it has Cuda cores/is an Nvidia card.
Scene Optimizer, a product available through the Daz store, can help with the reducing the sizes of texture maps thing.
Otherwise, your scenes will always go CPU only if they are larger than the card can handle. Your graphics card still helps with the viewport in non-Iray modes though, so it's not completely useless.
If you end up going for an older Nvidia card with more VRAM, say 6-8 GB, that has Cuda cores, that might be preferable. I'm sure some of the others around here that are using older cards can weigh in here.
Also, if you are going the 3Delight route rather than the Iray route, those renders are CPU only to begin with in Daz, so an Nvidia graphics card won't be of much help there.
That's a really old model, I'm not certaian it's currently supported but there's a good chance it won't be suported soom (I have a 750Ti and am aware that the clock is ticking).
If possible cancel this order ASAP. This is a truly and thoroughly awful card.
Nvidia keeps releasing these "graphics cards" and unsuspecting people buy them and then are bitterly disappointed.
DDR3, and all other DDR versions, are slow as molasses compared to any recent GDDR version, at least in the sorts of workloads GPU's do.
One version of this card is Fermi and won't work at all in iRay.
Furthermore this thing has 384 Kepler, hopefully, CUDA which is really a tiny number and CUDA is what determines render speed of the GPU.
I was using iray on my other computer with my old GTX 760 before that stopped working and it was actually faster on CPU!
Thanks for the replies! Fortunately, I can just refuse the Amazon order and get my money back; agreed, my current card isn't all that great to start with: AMD Gigabyte Radeon HD 5450 1GB DDR3
Just purchased the Scene Optimizer :)
Regardless of its age/features, a Radeon is not nVidia, and so won't have any CUDA cores at all and will be ignored by Iray.
If you can make use of 2 PCIe slots for your graphics cards, that Radeon card might still be useful for running the viewport in Daz, for Non-Iray modes, and you could also use it to run your desktop. This would free up whichever Nvidia card you end up with 100% for rendering, which will help with lagginess while GPU based rendering is going on.
Of course, if you want to game on the Nvidia card too, that could change your priorities, as the newer Nvidia card will be better suited for the latest games.
Okay so...keeping in mind that I'm on a budget, any recommendations for a good video card that won't break the bank? I'm a hobbyist but it would be nice to speed up the rendering process!
What is your budget, and where in the world are you (if the curreny of the budget doesn't make that clear)?
Toronto Canada...as far as budget goes let's say the cheaper the better. Canada Computer had 4GB cards "on sale" for $220. Canadian before taxes...so I wanted to see if I could do better for the money
How about this:
https://www.amazon.ca/GTX-1050-TI-4GT-OC/dp/B01MG3IX4F/
ETA: posted the wrong link, updated
You'll be much better off buying a used card on eBay or Craigslist, is Craigslist in Canada? I don't know.
On US eBay there are GTX 1070's, a very good 8Gb card, for less than $200US.
https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=gtx+1070&_sacat=175673&_sop=12
Or this which should be newer:
https://www.amazon.ca/GeForce-128-Bit-Support-DirectX-Graphics/dp/B07QPXT4NG/
Problem with used cards is that you never know if they have been (ab)used for cryptomining and therefore may have a short life (and not much warranty left, if any).
I might be scraping the bottom of the barrel, but how about something like this:
https://www.amazon.ca/Martinimble-GTX750Ti-Graphics-HD6850-Geforce/dp/B07MFNMHM4/ref=sr_1_52_sspa?keywords=nvidia+geforce&qid=1570223889&s=pc&sr=1-52-spons&psc=1&spLa=ZW5jcnlwdGVkUXVhbGlmaWVyPUFRWElYNTQ1TExUWiZlbmNyeXB0ZWRJZD1BMDM1ODczMjEzRkJVQlhQNDhKSVImZW5jcnlwdGVkQWRJZD1BMDY0Mjc4NENJOElKUkpQQzBNViZ3aWRnZXROYW1lPXNwX2J0ZiZhY3Rpb249Y2xpY2tSZWRpcmVjdCZkb05vdExvZ0NsaWNrPXRydWU=
or this:
https://www.amazon.ca/Yutang-128Bit-Express-Graphics-GeForce/dp/B07V6H7C2R/ref=sr_1_69?keywords=nvidia+geforce&qid=1570224018&s=pc&sr=1-69
or that one?
https://www.amazon.ca/Bigmai-NVIDIA-GeForce-Graphics-Discrete/dp/B07SXGL33N/ref=sr_1_93?keywords=nvidia+geforce&qid=1570224249&s=pc&sr=1-93
Be careful with the cheap ones, there are fake cards out there.
The GTX 1660 cards might be a nice compromise for you. 6 GB of VRAM is a bit lower than what people often recommend these days, but as long as you keep your scenes under control a number of people here seem to be able to make that work.
Just did a Google search, seeing some cards for a bit over $200, but those are US prices. Amazon.ca is showing the GTX 1660 starting at $299.
When my GTX1080 died about a year ago, I was briefly using a GTX670 with 2GB vram. Just for giggles, I tested it out with DS (I think it would have been build 4.10) and it actually worked... sort of. I was able to load up the genesis 8 female base figure, no clothes or hair, default rendering background. It rendered about 3 times as fast as my CPU (6 core i7 5930K). Windows task manager reported the VRAM usage as something like 1.9GB.
2 of those are 730's. Just like the one we talkedyou out of.
The 750ti is bad but could work marginally for a year or two. Note I fully expect Fermi, the architecture in the 750ti, to not work in iRay after the next major release of DS.
Canada is horrible pricewise. Just recently blew 1500 to get a 2080 super. Everything costs like double up here lol. I wish my paycheck was also double what it was back in NY, then it wouldn't be all that bad lol.
But Walmart is cheap, isn't it? (hurry, the page says "Almost sold out!")
https://www.walmart.ca/en/ip/GeForce-GTX1050-2GB/PRD3TLVS25UMKQH
And the review says "Bang for the buck". Hm.
hahahaha that sounds about right. The other day I was looking for some creatine there, and I saw one listed at 10k. Was curious if it was still up like that, nope, but I did find a great deal on a book about creatine haha https://www.walmart.ca/en/ip/Creatine-and-Creatine-Phosphate-Scientific-and-Clinical-Perspectives/PRD2DZMC3J724NB
The TechPowerUp forums are full of people getting landed with fake cards so I would be wary of EBay etc
buy a card from an authorised dealer, it will cost you less than being ripped off
I would not touch a private reseller or used card myself
I have a 980ti which is not a bad card my issues are with DAZ studio and needing latest drivers and my need for 431.60 for iClone, not the card itself
...I have a 750 Ti on my assembly system and it seems to be doing fine for rendering proofs of characters with a simple background. Generally it takes a little over a minute for a 636 x 900 image. Yeah not as fast as my Titan-X or the newer cards but much better than 40 - 50 minutes on the CPU.
...kind of fun watching the video of GTA while he was talking.
Indeed, this is something to be concerned about. Buyer beware a little research can go a long way to avoid getting stung with a fake card.
Which is why I thought I'd ask. :)