Slow rendering -- do I need get a new desktop with more memory; faster processor
rnollman
Posts: 310
I am working on illustrations for a children's book. It is about a girl who lives in the woods with the animals and has lots of scenes with forests etc. So I purchased the Lost Place to see how well I could work with DAZ products to produce scenes for the book. I selected the Lost Place entire set from the Content Library which contains multiple trees, bushes, rocks, and so on -- very complex geometry.
My first disappointment was that the only way I could effectively move around in the scene is with wire bounding box selected. I rendered the scene with the 3Delight renderer and it took a half hour to render. When I added lights (from the package), it took 2.5 hours. I once tried to use IRAY but it was so slow that I just gave up on it, maybe because I had not experienced slow render times with the 3Delight renderer at the time. I just figured there were issues with the IRAY.
Question 1:
Are those normal rendering times for my Toshiba laptop which has Windows 8, a Pentium 2020 @ 2.40 GHz, and 6 GB ram.
Question 2:
I looked into getting a desktop computer with higher performance with 24 to 32 Gb of memory and faster and more efficient CPU, possible with double core processing. A new computer with that kind of processing power was out of my price range. So I looked into a refurbished computer. Newegg offered many refurbished models that were what I would consider graphics workstations.
Here are three that I found at what seemed to be a very reasonable cost. Is buying one of these refurbished computers to use with DAZ Studio a good idea? The technology is a bit dated, but compared to my current desktop, they are multiples faster and have substantially more memory. Or do I have to spend $2000 to $4000 for a new computer?
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Dell Precision T3500, Intel Xeon W3530 2.8GHz Quad Core CPU, 24GB memory, 2TB hard drive, NVIDIA Quadro FX1800, Windows 7 Professional Installed $500
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Dell Precision T3500, Intel Xeon X5647 2.93GHz Quad Core CPU, 24GB memory, 1TB hard drive, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 SuperClocked, Windows 7 Professional Installed $500
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HP Z400 Workstation, Intel Xeon W3680 3.33GHz Six Core CPU,24GB memory, 2TB hard drive, NVIDIA Quadro 4000, Windows 7 Professional Installed $839
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Comments
CPU determines how fast you can render with 3Delight, cuda cores on your graphics card determine how fast you can render in Iray. Regular RAM determines how much you can have in your scene before the viewport starts getting really sluggish. RAM on your video card determines if you can render that scene in Iray with the video card, if it's too much it'll switch to CPU and take f-o-r-e-v-e-r. The problem with woods is the transparency maps on the leaves, it's going to take a long time not matter how good of a system you have.
There are ways to speed things up with 3Delight, notibly Age of Armour's special lights have settings you can mess with to reduce calculations where you don't need them to be as perfect like leaf canopys. If you want to make things as fast as you can use 3Delight, only use the regular light (spot and distant) avoid uber environment light and point lights as they raytrace. Set your shadows on the lights mapped and it should go pretty quick. You might get some artifacts though, there is a bug with 3Delight that's been around for years that causes little multicolored spots when using mapped shadows, they're usually pretty easy to post-work out though.. so 20 minutes render + 5 minutes of fixing spots is better than 4 hours to render.
I assume that IRAY produces a higher quality render. Correct? I do alot of post processing with Photoshop, so I wonder if the difference between IRAY and 3Delight really matters to me. I am not looking for photo-realism. I have a specific style and look for the illustrations that are more like watercolors. Is there some link where I can see comparisons of IRAY vs. 3Delight images? In your work do you use 3Delight or IRAY to render your scenes?
I guess one simple question is regarding the ads for various products in the DAZ marketplace. Do you think that many of them are rendered in 3Delight or IRAY or some other program, like Carrera? I suppose I can ask the guy who created the Lost Place how he rendered the scenes for his ad, the configuration of the machine he used, and how much time it took to render the scene.
So, it is the CPU that is critical for rendering 3Delight images. But without making the changes you suggest, the rendering time will be slow even with a faster CPU. The rendering is just too compute intensive. A faster CPU may help, but rendering times will still be slow. The refurbished computers that I mentioned in my post, will they cut down the rendering time substantially or not?
If I upgrade to say, 24 Gb of RAM, then will I fix the problem of a sluggish viewport?
The IRAY issues seems problematical to me. Even if I have a 4Gb video card, I have no idea if the scene will fit into its memory or end up being processed by the CPU. And if the scene does fit into the video card memory, am I still looking at 4 hour rendering times?
Thanks for you help. You have at least clarified the issues that I face. I do not see a viable solution because I am not that familiar with the more complex aspects of DAZ Studio. It may be simply a matter of accepting that four hour rendering times will be the norm.
If you aren't interested in photorealism, I'd highly recommend trying 3DL for a while. There are a lot of cool bells and whistles that only work in 3DL.
If the scene fits in the video card, the Iray render will be (much) faster than the CPU render. This assumes a recent Nvidia GPU with CUDA core support.
Consider more cores as well as a higher clock rate. Most CPU renderers make very good use of multi threading.
I would opt to stick with 3delight and only CPU matters when rendering, RAM will let you put more in to a scene. 3DL offers more artistic effects than Iray (including other unbiased render engine) find hard to do. Lighting in 3DL is a little harder to grasp for some as you are faking everything, whereas Iray is better as a one light solution that 3DL offers.
Are we sure that RAM doesn't affect scene rendering? I posted the other day how my computer eats up considerable amounts of RAM rendering, which limits what I can put into the scene. My processes show DS using 9 GB and my total peaking at ~13GB used out of 16. Around there stuff starts crashing. So RAM does affect rendering, but not speed.
CPU and GPU renders in IRAY are the same appearance-wise; the quality between IRAY and 3Delight, is more to do with style. Skills too, mine suck in IRAY, but sucked even more in 3Delight. :)
It will have a little effect at first, once its transfered to the card, the effect will be relatively small. It will definitely have an effect if the CPU is being used for rendering.
How does the CPU work when using a scene too big for the card? I have a 780 with 3GB vram and I'm thinking my slow renders are because it's overflowing the card.
There is no 'overflowing' the card...if it doesn't fit, it just drops the card and uses CPU only. It's an 'on/off' thing.
Well that explains my issues. Any way of seeing how much memory the scene will be (so I can trim it to fit on the card) ?
If I do stick with 3Delight rendering which means that CPU is most important AND I get one of the refurbished machines with a more powerful CPU, what effect would a 2GB versus a 4 Gb video card have on my rendering speed and ability to move things around in the viewport? From what I am hearing, the CPU will affect the rendering time, the fact that the machine has 24GB of RAM will affect the viewport response (HUGE for me). So what effect, if any, will a faster video card with more (4GB) or memory have? The reason I ask is because the refurbished machine will have an older video card, and for $200+ I can upgrade the video card. The question is, would I need or want to? Do I gain anything?
You can hardware accelerate your viewport and I think that uses your VRAM. Any modern card is good enough for that. 3Delight is entirely CPU based, so your videocard will not affecr your render speeds. I haave an i7-4770 overclocked at 4.4Ghz and 3Dleight does some good renders in under 15 minutes for me. I have to find a way to get a 3Dleight render to go above around that.
Fast iray rendering is very expensive if you want good photorealism.
Yeaa I would stick with 3Delight for your watercolor type renderings, you'll be able to have a lot more control 'cause you can fake things in 3Delight, Iray is awesome at what it does but you can't fake it into doing special effects like you can with 3Delight.
Oh man I keep forgettting to subscribe to a thread even when posted.
Yeah I had one Iray scene take about a Gig of ram at rest but when rendering with Iray, CPU only, it went up to just short of 7 Gig. I need more RAM methinks.
for 3Delight rendering your "bottleneck" is the CPU on your computer.
your P2020 is dual core CPU. Rendering buckets in 3Delight (the little black squares that appear and then fill in as you render) happen 2 at a time. Basically your CPU was made for entry level computer with users who have very basic needs so getting the data, processing the data and outputting the data are happening on a CPU that is going to have design limitations for intensive tasks.
The Xeon CPU's are multithreaded so a single Xeon will allow 8 buckets ( or 12 for the "6" core) rendering at the same time. The CPU's are for heavy loads and CPU rendering is what they excel at.