I don't think Iray likes my system..
hacsart
Posts: 2,034
well..even though I do not have an Nvidia video card, after seeing some posts here that seem to suggest, that if set up correctly, a scene in Iray should be not that much worsein terms of render speed than the 3Delight render engine. Set up a simple scene, with one distant light adn the Ponte Maggiore set. Rendered in 3Delight - 4 minutes 12 seconds at a res of 1680x1050 to completion... For Iray, applied the uber shader as per tutorials, removed the distant light and used an HDR environment - after 2 hours - 121 Iterations. and about 2% complete... System is an AMD 1-10-6800 at 4.1GHZ with 16GB ram -
So for the time being.. no Iray pour moi..
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Any scene with just a single normal light will generally render a lot faster in 3DL than iRay, and this has been stated in a number of places. Where they are (supposedly) comparable is where the 3DL render is using some sort of global illumination (ie indirect/ambient lighting).
That said, a 3DL scene lit using an advanced ambient light would likely still outrun iRay (using just CPU), however using a UE light with default settings, the render times for 3DL would be closer to the equivalently lit iRay scene.
Hmm.. well. then what could be considered a "fair comparison" set of components in a scene in terms of testing the two render engines?
Run the Iray test scene in this thread: http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/53771/iray-starter-scene-post-your-benchmarks/p1 and see how your computer compares with others.
These two pictures took just over an hour in both Iray and 3Delight. I don't have a Nvidia card so only using CPU. This is an i5 with 16GB ram and Intell HD 4000 integrated graphics. The scene was an old scene set up for 3Delight and the only difference was the girl on the left, I had to apply the Iray base female shader to get her skin to render, even although the blue colour was quite fetching
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/59172/iray-any-useful-info-or-tutorials-on-lights#latest
My experience is similar. I'm not interested in comparing scenes set up to show Iray at its most efficient, I'm interested in rendering the scenes I create. I've tried this with scenes I've already rendered in 3Delight using AoA Advanced lights (1x Distant, 1x Ambient and 1x Spot) and Amazing Skins.
Three people clothed, interior room, furniture,etc. takes about 20 minutes in 3Delight. I set up Iray (CPU) according to the advice I've read here, using Iray materials and lights and left it to render. After 2 hours it was about 20% and grainy. Luxrender using Reality 2.5 was quicker than that. I have an iMac 2012 i7 with 24GB RAM.
The thing is that I've finally started to get the 3Delight renders looking more natural. Not quite as natural as Iray or Luxrender but close. I've seen some comparison pictures poseted here and the 3Delight version generally looks poor. But with some effort setting up lights and skins, 3Delight can produce some decent results (even in my amateur hands). Having said that, if the new Luxrender 1.5 via Reality 4 turns out to be as quick as promised by Paolo, then I might just return to that. The great advantage of Reality/Lux is that it can render in the background (and/or via the network) leaving me free to work on the next scene in DAZ Studio. The great disadvantage is that setting up materials can be a PITA.
I've been minimizng my setup for Lux through reality by setting my surfaces up for Reality to interpret close or right to where I want them inside studio but on big projects setting up all those surfaces l can still be a long march up a steep hill. The results are worth it thouhg.
Am also noticing without the video card (I have a 5 year old nvidia card, it's time to put it to pasture) Lux render gives me faster and better resutls so far on my i7 920 and my dual xeon mac.
Sometimes Iray is the right tool for the job (and the temperment or tastes of the artist). Sometimes Lux is. Sometimes 3delight is. I do not understand why so many people (at least, the vocal ones) seem to feel somehow obliged to use one to the exclusion of the others, or to pick a 'team'.
Stating results is not picking a "team". I'm using what works for me but I've been using Iray (and I still use 3Delight frequently) and at this time my findings are Iray is impractical with either of my production computers as they lack either newer nvidia cards or any nvidia cards (i7 920 2.6/12GB, Dual Xeon 2.6/64GB) I'm working on renders that break the 12GB threshold and single video card to do that work is going to be well over $1000, and you can't stick two 6GB cards in there, you get the combined cores but not the combined RAM so again, not an option.
However I do feel that AMD/ATI Studio users got excluded in any benefit to having a great GPU. ATI's with 8GB can be had for $350, Nvidia's with the same you need to double that cost. It's a very specific rendering engine to a select market otherwise it will get the job done at the cost of time vs quality like anything else out there if you don't have the HW to use it optimally. FWIW the newer macs coming out are going all ATI for anything with more than 2GB GPU RAM so its exclusionary to them as well with anything but CPU renders.
When you say that your renders need 12GB, how are you measuring that? It is of interest because the amount of memory studio needs to load and edit a scene, and the amount of memory a GPU needs to render it, can be significantly different.
+1 on this question. I'm very curious how to tell how much of the scene is loaded into my VRAM during a render.
you can use third party tools for Vram usage because daz opted not to build it into the software. You could use MSI Afterburner but I use it for other things..it just happens to also measure Vram so I know it could be helpful.
If you really need 12gb of Vram there are cheaper ways to render unbiased really fast where Vram won't be an issue assuming you have sutable system RAM to use..No need to buy those overpriced video cards. But I'll leave that alone. Cuase it's not with iRay. But I think it's valid to say software and hardware cost both need to be considered and if the free software requires you to use 1k hardware you don't want..maybe should think of other solutions.
I use afterburner to OC my card, but it never goes above 60% power range during a render which makes me doubt the acuracy.
The Nvidia control panal applet should tell you how much video memory is being used...
Three's always going to be about a 100 MB to half a gig of 'overhead' if you are also using the render card for display purposes. And if you allow Iray to compress the textures, you'll save some memory. High SubD can eat up memory, quickly...so can very large, textures.
I believe that these tools only tell you how much memory you are using if you have a card, not how much memory you would need if you did not have a card, or had one that had too little VRAM. This would be useful for someone considering buying a card, and thus seeing what size of VRAM they need for one of their own scenes.
Memory is being checked through the task manager or the activity monitor depending on what OS. When I strip my system down to a boot process with the bare minimum of tools needed to start the computer (I don't run 3rd party perpetuals, firewall or Anti-Virus on my PC). In many cases I've either exported the .RIB to a standalone 3Delight or .LXS for LuxRender and Studio is not even running at the time, so yes, turning off Studio will free up RAM, but I've done that already. Studio is stable with all the geometry and many of the assets I'm using or making I'm often using high-res textures and high-polly models but in addition I use depreciated assets as well, some with small or no texture maps set to a non reflective matte that I've decimated. While I could do some of this in layers of scenes taking out assets for one render, making another with them I often find it's more postwork than I expected and I can run into problems. I like to render as much as I possibly can and then use very little postwork to clean up or something simply can't get to look good in a render, but shadows and light and reflections and gloss, I try to leave that to the engine which usually knows better.
The bottom line is if I'm doing this and hitting my limits with 12GB system RAM I am under the impression that a 4GB video card would not work for these types of scenes. If I'm doing portraits, of course and I probably will invest in a new card at some point but I thought prices might drop after the Taiwan show in June and only AMD appeared to take that as a yes at this time. Am I anti Iray, not at all, I just need suitable HW. The stuff I've seen so far is impressive, it's far better than cycles which I never got the hang of and do I prefer LuxRender, yes, because I can use it in Blender and I've already had exposure to it before I even tried to use Blender. I could use Iray for Blender as well so at some point I hope to get suitable HW to utilize it.