How to Improve Render Quality with an 8GB GPU
MiladySerah
Posts: 0
Hey everyone!
Does anyone here have experience with getting the best possible render quality in DAZ when you only have an 8GB GPU?
Unfortunately, with prices being so high right now, I can’t afford to buy a better GPU, but I’m definitely planning to upgrade at some point. For now, though, I have to make do with my RTX 4060.
I don’t want to give up my hobby because of this, but I find it really difficult to get beautiful, sharp, detailed renders. I usually turn on the denoiser very early, but unfortunately, the final image ends up looking kind of mushy. This seems to happen no matter when I turn it on, even if I wait until after 2,000 iterations. I always set the max samples quite high, too.
However, if I leave the denoiser off completely, rendering takes twice as long, and I still end up with too much noise.
I already try to keep my scenes as minimal as possible to save VRAM, but I still can’t seem to achieve renders that look as realistic as those of so many other artists.
Does anyone have any tips or perhaps some render settings I could try?
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Comments
Difficult.
Keep your scene most sparse.
Look for a camera clipping tool. ( hides everything outside the camera's field of view. You can choose, if lights are clipped as well)
Consider to render in passes. (Forefround, middleground and background)
There is a tool called Scene Optimizer here in the store. It can reduce texture sizes in a scene and saves it in your texture folder without overwriting.
Right now I am working on a project, that includes lots of renders.
In order to manage that, I render at low resulution by 1600 X 900 pxls.
I use the latest Paint shop Pro in order to upscale the render results with AI support. Yes, AI, but NOT generative AI.
Hope that helps :)
The real question is how strong is the rest of the computer. The normal answer to your problem is lots of beauty canvases. But if your computer can't handle a big scene, canvases don't help.
But ultimately rendering in pieces and assembling externally is probably the way to go.
It could be just your settings. I have an RTX 4050 with 6GB and my images look noise free and sharp, to me anyway :)
Well, that doesn’t really help me with my problem. I’ve been using the Scene Optimizer from the very beginning. I always reduce everything to 2K. I can render just fine. It’s not like my renders always crash or anything. I’ve even managed to render scenes with multiple characters.
My only concern is that the final image doesn’t look like mush, but actually shows skin details, such as pores, for example, and that the skin doesn’t look like plastic. That’s mainly why I was asking about render settings. Maybe I’ve got something set up incorrectly in terms of what my GPU can handle.
I’ve also specifically switched to small vignette scenes or 2D backgrounds, where I build a little scene myself using a few props. I do all of this to keep the focus on the character so that at least the character itself has good quality. But I just can’t seem to get it right.
I’m aware that my GPU can’t work miracles, but surely it should still be possible to retain at least some degree of realism in the characters.
I just feel like I have to rely on the denoiser because otherwise I can never get rid of the noise, no matter how long I let the render run. But how do you set it up correctly? Or maybe I’ve got the render quality settings wrong. Do you even need to change those? I’ve always left them on the default settings.
I’ve always used Mitchell for the pixel filter and set the radius to 1.0, sometimes even lower. I have no idea whether that actually makes any difference to the problem I’m having.
That’s why I’d really like to know what settings other people use if they also don’t have an especially powerful GPU but have somehow managed to keep their characters looking realistic.
Could you maybe share your render settings with me, then? That would be really helpful!
Well, my renders otherwise work fine without crashing or anything. They just usually take an hour or even longer. So I assume the rest of my hardware is adequate, at least for my PC, which isn’t exactly new anymore. As I said, I’m planning to upgrade at some point anyway, but that’s just not possible right now.
I’m still happy to list my hardware, though:
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 5700X
RAM: 32GB
GPU: RTX 4060 with 8GB VRAM
OS: Windows 11
It really is just the quality of my characters’ skin that bothers me. It always looks so blurry and mushy. I never see any skin details, like pores or anything else.
And no, I don’t really touch the surface settings to change anything. I load the characters into the scene as they are. The only thing I use is the Scene Optimizer to reduce textures to 2K so my graphics card doesn’t crash when I work with larger scenes containing multiple characters.
I just don’t understand what I’m doing wrong. Other people manage to get it right, too...
I have a v similar rig.
I can do these (30mins and 60mins render time):
https://www.daz3d.com/gallery/user/5444756578500608#gallery=newest&page=1&sort=trending&image=1351734 :
https://www.daz3d.com/gallery/user/5444756578500608#gallery=newest&page=1&sort=trending&image=1349453
NB: That is Viki 8k, so there's a heap of skin-detail. Do you have an 8k skin to check? The other image uses a custom SkinBuilder Skin (G8).
FWIW: some characters only reveal detail in SubD3 and greater, so check that. And if you are using SceneOpto on the characters, then that will be the problem.
For a simple scene - like Viki and the bow and arrow - you shouldn't have problems pulling lots of sharp detail.My settings are pretty much vanilla, I don't use the denoiser etc.
Try attaching a render - or gallery link - you've done so we can see what you mean
The machine I'm on now isn't massively different spec to yours. Ryzen 5 3600, 32GB DDR4 3200MHz, RTX 3080Ti, W11. I originally built it some years ago with a 4060 before upgrading and the system has been tweaked a little to improve performance.
I had similar issues with "fuzziness" as I call it. After some trial and error, plus a few hints from friends and on here, I found that playing with scene lighting made a huge difference. Also, I tend to only start denoiser after 2000 iterations and tend to use it only in low light scenes. I also have auto headlamp switched off permanently.
The attached render was done on the 4060 in 4k resolution without denoiser. It took about 5 hours. Not the best G8 character, I think the base character I used was a fairly old asset. I'm not too sure what went on with her forehead either, it looks like she's growing hair out of it.
Unfortunately, I can’t open the first link, and as for the second one, yes, you can see some nice details there. You can really achieve that in 30–60 minutes?
I admit that I’ve usually applied the Scene Optimizer to the characters as well, because whenever I had one with 8K textures, my GPU would immediately give up if I also loaded an environment. I’d just get a black image, and the render would stop instantly.
Not every character I own has 8K textures. Most use 4K textures and are game models rather than original DAZ characters. However, the last character I bought definitely has high-resolution 8K textures, and I’ve also seen renders by other artists using this character where you can actually see the skin details. With mine, though, all I get is mush.
I’ll try attaching an image, the last one I rendered using this exact character. There are no details to speak of, and this is what my renders usually look like when they’re finished.
As I said, I’ve also tried leaving the denoiser off, but then all that’s left at the end is noise, which looks just as bad. I’ll try following your advice, though. I’m just worried that my GPU will crash again...
That doesn't look too bad to me. What character is she? If she's G8, I more than likely have her so can run a render through for comparison.
The top looks a little plasticy so maybe change the textures? Also, does the it have dForce? It looks a little odd having it clinging to the midriff, it should be hanging a little on her left side.
Have you tried adding DoF? That will reduce the VRAM usage quite a bit.
I have attached my default scene that loads with DAZ Studio and it has all my startup settings. I do change a couple of things depending on the scene mostly environment brightness, Dome rotation and Crush Blacks.
Yes, it’s a G8 character. And no, the clothing doesn’t have dForce, and I haven’t added it either. I’m still not really familiar with how that works, so when something like that bothers me, I’d rather use clothing that already comes with dForce.
I’ve actually given up on this render and haven’t finished it because I’m already unhappy with the character’s skin. As I said, the character actually comes with good textures, but I can’t see any skin details.
Maybe I’m also using DoF incorrectly and simply having too much of the character outside the focus area, which would make it look slightly blurry as well. But honestly, I find that hard to believe. I mean, even the face isn’t sharp or realistic, and that was in focus.
I’ll just keep experimenting. Maybe I’ll eventually manage to make my renders look better.
Thank you! I’ll give it a try with these settings.
I would
a) Render at 720P
b) Upscale to FHD or 2K using DLSS with an app designed to use your RTX 4060 8GB GPU to do specifically that
(I corrected the 1st link in my original post, if you'd like to take a look at an 8k figure)
(Yes, took just over an hour for the second render)
Thanks for attaching your image, it's not too shabby at all; your lighting is very good
Some things you might try:
Your attachment shows you can render well... IME, learning/practicing what some folk on here call the pro-tricks takes longer still (I still am!)
It looks like the denoiser is removing the skin details you're looking for!
Is the detailed skin visible in the renders that you consider noisy?