Is there a way to render in the background using limited resources?

PoshTentacle

Hello!

I am fairly new to Daz Studio, and I am currently working on creating renders for my first visual novel project. My PC isn't terrible, but my hardware isn't high-end enough for me to reliably do other things on my machine while waiting for my renders to finish.

So I had an idea: what if I were to take a page out of the playbook of programs like Steam? Could I render images slowly in the background while limiting the maximum resources used by Daz Studio so that I would still be able to do other things on my PC?

Now I understand that some resources have a fixed requirement. For example, there has to be enough VRAM available in order to load all of the items in the scene simultaneously. But what about things like CPU usage? Is there a way that I could cap Daz Studio at, say, 25% CPU usage?

I understand that this will make my renders take much longer, but if the rendering process can be done almost passively, I think the longer wait times would be worth the trade-off.

(Also, I am very aware that what Daz Studio does and what Steam does are wildly different. I was just trying to use Steam as an easy-to-understand example)

SofaCitizen

Why not just leave renders going overnight while you sleep? If you are rendering on the CPU the scenes are already going to take around 8-12 times longer and so capping at 25%, if that was possible, would multiply that by 4 which would mean it would likely stretch over 24 hours anyway.

crosswind

You cannot literally control GPU Load but you can control CPU Load if you render with CPU.... by setting CPU Load Limit in Render Settings in terms of CPU cores.

charles

you should not goto CPU unless your GPu is just not capable of handling it.Scale down the resolution and or reduse scene gemotery..switch to a pure HDRI or SunSky scene with no extra lights, set in Rendering optimization Guided Sampling.The brighter the HDR scene the quicker and easier, if you need assistance with HDRI in closed room settings consider Paper Tiger's X-Ray camera to let HDRI lighting in and get rid of other lights.

A clean bright simple HDRI lit scene will render in fractions of the time than the built in lighting..it can be tricky and one needs to play with it..but the results are also usually supperior to other lighting methods.. I mean REALLY SUPERIOR! but requires more effort for good effect.

Leana

In the render settings pane, when Iray is selected as render engine there's a tab for hardware where you can select which hardware to use. 

At the bottom of the tab there's a "CPU Load limit" parameter, which tells DS how many cores of the CPU it can use: by default all of them, but you could limit that so that you have cores available for something else (render will be slower obviously)

More info on this parameter: https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/5534391/#Comment_5534391