New Iray render engine. Too good to be true?

1356789

Comments

  • fastbike1fastbike1 Posts: 4,078
    edited January 2017

    I'm not seeing that impact at all. Also, the release notes lead me to believe that there will be less noise in dimly lighted areas than before. The attached render was stopped at 86% with a 95% convergence setting. Looks clean to me.

    I find that it is faster, but beware the convergence. 95% convergence is rather grainy now compared to the previous version. I'm now upping the convergence to 99% where I would never do this on the older version.

     

     

    VYK Paige G3F -1 86%.png
    1000 x 1500 - 2M
    Post edited by fastbike1 on
  • pdspds Posts: 593
    fastbike1 said:

    I'm not seeing that impact at all. Also, the release notes lead me to believe thatthere will be less noise in dimly lighted areas than before. The attached render was stopped at 86% with a 95% convergence setting. Looks clean to me.

    I find that it is faster, but beware the convergence. 95% convergence is rather grainy now compared to the previous version. I'm now upping the convergence to 99% where I would never do this on the older version.

     

     

    I'm curious if you were to run the same scene in the previous version of Studio whether the cove would look the same. Another person commented previously that he had experienced a less desirable result with a cyc wall cove. The lighting on your subject looks great, but the cove transition seems less subtle. In the real world, that can be a result of using too small of a cove radius for the cyc wall. It would also be interesting to see what result you get if you scaled up the cove.

    Please don't misinterpret my comment as a criticism of your render; if the IRay/Studio update is somehow responsible for a difference (right, wrong, or otherwise) in how the cove is rendered, that implies it could be affecting other aspects of renders and seems worth noting. :-)

  • ChoholeChohole Posts: 33,604
    edited January 2017

    Yes, that is correct - it isn't the only update to DS, but it is an important one for users of Pascal cards

     

    So to sumarize for my understanding, there is an update for DS4.9, and it includes a new iRay render engine which can now use the new Pascal video cards.

    Is that correct?

    Thanks.

     

     

    Post edited by Chohole on
  • I use an older Macbook Pro. It has an NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M that I think isn't compatible with Iray, as it only shows CPU on the advanced settings. This new version of Iray is significantly faster on my Mac. Darker areas of a scene used to take forever to render enough to eliminate fireflies. I would often despeckle these trouble spots in Photoshop. I just did a test image of a very dark night scene and it looked as good in 30 minutes as what used to take a couple of hours. I'm very happy.

  • AllenArtAllenArt Posts: 7,175

    I've noticed that it's faster as well. I haven't tried it yet on my dual Xeon machine (64 gigs of ram, 980Ti 6 gb), but on my i7 laptop it's quite a bit faster :). I have a 970M 6gb on that.

    Laurie

  • TaozTaoz Posts: 10,232
    edited January 2017
    pds said:
    fastbike1 said:

    I'm not seeing that impact at all. Also, the release notes lead me to believe thatthere will be less noise in dimly lighted areas than before. The attached render was stopped at 86% with a 95% convergence setting. Looks clean to me.

    I find that it is faster, but beware the convergence. 95% convergence is rather grainy now compared to the previous version. I'm now upping the convergence to 99% where I would never do this on the older version.

     

     

    I'm curious if you were to run the same scene in the previous version of Studio whether the cove would look the same. Another person commented previously that he had experienced a less desirable result with a cyc wall cove.

    I did a test in CPU mode of the same scene in both the new and the previous version, both using default Iray settings. The new version took almost twice the time and used almost twice as many iterations before it finished.

    Post edited by Taoz on
  • Sheesh, I feel like the odd one out since I haven't experienced this awesome speed increase everyone else is seeing. If anything, I think Iray is actually taking longer than it did previously. Granted, I'm on an older machine with only a GTX650 and 1GB VRAM. Is there any way to optimize my settings to get a little boost? (render settings attached)

    Also, what does the "spectral rendering" setting do?

     

    Render settings 1.JPG
    449 x 636 - 29K
    Render settings 2.JPG
    447 x 402 - 33K
    Render settings 3.JPG
    454 x 453 - 44K
  • HavosHavos Posts: 5,573

    Sheesh, I feel like the odd one out since I haven't experienced this awesome speed increase everyone else is seeing. If anything, I think Iray is actually taking longer than it did previously. Granted, I'm on an older machine with only a GTX650 and 1GB VRAM. Is there any way to optimize my settings to get a little boost? (render settings attached)

    Also, what does the "spectral rendering" setting do?

    With just 1 GB of VRAM it is likely most of your scenes are rendering on CPU only, unless you render some very light resourced scenes. Maybe the speed increase some of us are seeing is only for rendering with CUDA cores, which you would not see when rendering on CPU alone.

     

  • mjc1016mjc1016 Posts: 15,001
    edited January 2017

    Sheesh, I feel like the odd one out since I haven't experienced this awesome speed increase everyone else is seeing. If anything, I think Iray is actually taking longer than it did previously. Granted, I'm on an older machine with only a GTX650 and 1GB VRAM. Is there any way to optimize my settings to get a little boost? (render settings attached)

    Also, what does the "spectral rendering" setting do?

     

    Spectral Rendering turns on 'full spectrum' light calculations...in other words, it makes the light 'more real', not just in behavior, but in composition too.  It does increase the length of time to render...especially with the caustics sampler turned on.

    Here's a render...

    spectral.png
    512 x 640 - 522K
    Post edited by mjc1016 on
  • fastbike1fastbike1 Posts: 4,078
    edited January 2017

    I think you have a couple of my responses confused. The render of the figure was in response to a comment about grainyness. The render doesn't use the RenderStudio cove. I did see the issue with the Cove in the new version, but have nothing to compare since I never rendered the Cove in 4.9.2.70. 

    pds said:
    fastbike1 said:

    I'm not seeing that impact at all. Also, the release notes lead me to believe thatthere will be less noise in dimly lighted areas than before. The attached render was stopped at 86% with a 95% convergence setting. Looks clean to me.

    I find that it is faster, but beware the convergence. 95% convergence is rather grainy now compared to the previous version. I'm now upping the convergence to 99% where I would never do this on the older version.

     

     

    I'm curious if you were to run the same scene in the previous version of Studio whether the cove would look the same. Another person commented previously that he had experienced a less desirable result with a cyc wall cove. The lighting on your subject looks great, but the cove transition seems less subtle. In the real world, that can be a result of using too small of a cove radius for the cyc wall. It would also be interesting to see what result you get if you scaled up the cove.

    Please don't misinterpret my comment as a criticism of your render; if the IRay/Studio update is somehow responsible for a difference (right, wrong, or otherwise) in how the cove is rendered, that implies it could be affecting other aspects of renders and seems worth noting. :-)

     

    Post edited by fastbike1 on
  • 3-D Arena3-D Arena Posts: 199

    Sheesh, I feel like the odd one out since I haven't experienced this awesome speed increase everyone else is seeing. If anything, I think Iray is actually taking longer than it did previously. Granted, I'm on an older machine with only a GTX650 and 1GB VRAM. Is there any way to optimize my settings to get a little boost? (render settings attached)

    Also, what does the "spectral rendering" setting do?

     

    You're not the only one.  I have a gtx 770, 4GB VRAM and it's much slower for me.  Just doing spot renders is taking forever.... 

    I ended up reverting back to 2.9.2.7 but now it's even running slower than it was.  I swear upgtrading my drivers killed my rendering time lol

  • RAMWolffRAMWolff Posts: 10,343

    I'm still using my old machine and have a GTX 780 on board.  I can tell you the 3DL speed up is nil to none.  Doing promos right now using 3DL so haven't checked on an iRAY rendering engine as of yet. 

  • Havos said:

    Sheesh, I feel like the odd one out since I haven't experienced this awesome speed increase everyone else is seeing. If anything, I think Iray is actually taking longer than it did previously. Granted, I'm on an older machine with only a GTX650 and 1GB VRAM. Is there any way to optimize my settings to get a little boost? (render settings attached)

    Also, what does the "spectral rendering" setting do?

    With just 1 GB of VRAM it is likely most of your scenes are rendering on CPU only, unless you render some very light resourced scenes. Maybe the speed increase some of us are seeing is only for rendering with CUDA cores, which you would not see when rendering on CPU alone.

     

    Really? It's a lot slower if I uncheck the graphics card on the advanced settings, whereas if it's checked Iray renders much quicker. Wouldn't the speed be the same if it was just dumping the scene to the CPU?

  • HavosHavos Posts: 5,573
    Havos said:

    Sheesh, I feel like the odd one out since I haven't experienced this awesome speed increase everyone else is seeing. If anything, I think Iray is actually taking longer than it did previously. Granted, I'm on an older machine with only a GTX650 and 1GB VRAM. Is there any way to optimize my settings to get a little boost? (render settings attached)

    Also, what does the "spectral rendering" setting do?

    With just 1 GB of VRAM it is likely most of your scenes are rendering on CPU only, unless you render some very light resourced scenes. Maybe the speed increase some of us are seeing is only for rendering with CUDA cores, which you would not see when rendering on CPU alone.

     

    Really? It's a lot slower if I uncheck the graphics card on the advanced settings, whereas if it's checked Iray renders much quicker. Wouldn't the speed be the same if it was just dumping the scene to the CPU?

    Depends on the scene you are rendering. If you have several Genesis 3 characters in your scene and it still renders faster using the GPU then I am confused, as there is no way that scene would fit in 1GB of VRAM.

  • mtl1mtl1 Posts: 1,508
    Havos said:
    Havos said:

    Sheesh, I feel like the odd one out since I haven't experienced this awesome speed increase everyone else is seeing. If anything, I think Iray is actually taking longer than it did previously. Granted, I'm on an older machine with only a GTX650 and 1GB VRAM. Is there any way to optimize my settings to get a little boost? (render settings attached)

    Also, what does the "spectral rendering" setting do?

    With just 1 GB of VRAM it is likely most of your scenes are rendering on CPU only, unless you render some very light resourced scenes. Maybe the speed increase some of us are seeing is only for rendering with CUDA cores, which you would not see when rendering on CPU alone.

     

    Really? It's a lot slower if I uncheck the graphics card on the advanced settings, whereas if it's checked Iray renders much quicker. Wouldn't the speed be the same if it was just dumping the scene to the CPU?

    Depends on the scene you are rendering. If you have several Genesis 3 characters in your scene and it still renders faster using the GPU then I am confused, as there is no way that scene would fit in 1GB of VRAM.

    Iray does have texture compression, if the compression sizes were left at the default settings.

  • KA1KA1 Posts: 1,012

    So, I have a very noticable increase in render time after the update, however I have just rendered an image from yesterday (pre update) and although it was faster, even with identical render settings and lighting I am left with a far grainier render than the pre update render. I like the speed increase but experience so far indicates it's at the expense of final quality!!

  • mjc1016mjc1016 Posts: 15,001
    RAMWolff said:

    I'm still using my old machine and have a GTX 780 on board.  I can tell you the 3DL speed up is nil to none.  Doing promos right now using 3DL so haven't checked on an iRAY rendering engine as of yet. 

    Funny...I'm seeing about a 5 to 10% speed boost in 3DL...are you using Progressive > ON, for 3DL?

  • mjc1016mjc1016 Posts: 15,001
    mtl1 said:
    Havos said:
    Havos said:

    Sheesh, I feel like the odd one out since I haven't experienced this awesome speed increase everyone else is seeing. If anything, I think Iray is actually taking longer than it did previously. Granted, I'm on an older machine with only a GTX650 and 1GB VRAM. Is there any way to optimize my settings to get a little boost? (render settings attached)

    Also, what does the "spectral rendering" setting do?

    With just 1 GB of VRAM it is likely most of your scenes are rendering on CPU only, unless you render some very light resourced scenes. Maybe the speed increase some of us are seeing is only for rendering with CUDA cores, which you would not see when rendering on CPU alone.

     

    Really? It's a lot slower if I uncheck the graphics card on the advanced settings, whereas if it's checked Iray renders much quicker. Wouldn't the speed be the same if it was just dumping the scene to the CPU?

    Depends on the scene you are rendering. If you have several Genesis 3 characters in your scene and it still renders faster using the GPU then I am confused, as there is no way that scene would fit in 1GB of VRAM.

    Iray does have texture compression, if the compression sizes were left at the default settings.

    Or if they are all using the same textures...they'll only be loaded once.

  • mikekmikek Posts: 195

    I render by iteration limits and with that its so far as fast/slow as the older version. Looks to me like its for some just faster because it stops with less iterations when limited by convergence.
    Also my animation droped both times to the cpu which didn't happen in the beta from last month even when using a higher resolution. I'm testing at the moment without optix and will see if it runs through.

  • WandererWanderer Posts: 957

    I really, really don't feel like learning and sorting this update right now, but if I don't I'll feel the weight of it hanging over me until I get through it. Meh... Happy New Year!!!

  • KA1KA1 Posts: 1,012
    mikek said:

    I render by iteration limits and with that its so far as fast/slow as the older version. Looks to me like its for some just faster because it stops with less iterations when limited by convergence.
    Also my animation droped both times to the cpu which didn't happen in the beta from last month even when using a higher resolution. I'm testing at the moment without optix and will see if it runs through.

    Bingo!! Thank you for this little prod @mikek, my renders were maxing on convergence WAY too early, switched that off and a happy camper now!

  • PraxisPraxis Posts: 274

    FYI: SLI may cause big slowdown:

    System: 2 x GTX780 3GB, 6-Core i7, Win7 64bit.

    I upgraded my Nvidia drivers from 364.72 to 376.33, and DAZ Studio from 4.8.0.59 to 4.9.3.116, and IRay renders became a bit slower, and interactive IRay Viewport DrawStyle became unusably slow.

    Found that something (the driver upgrade?) had enabled SLI.  I don't remember doing that, but may have left it like that while testing in DS 4.8, with which SLI On/Off did'nt make much difference.

    Used the NVIDIA Control Panel to turn SLI Off, hit [Apply] and closed it.

    Re-ran my tests in DS 4.9.3.116, and ALL IS NOW GOOD:  Both IRay rendering and IRay interactive viewing are about 10% faster than they were in DS 4.8

     

     

  • jakibluejakiblue Posts: 7,281

    Has anyone noticed an actual difference in the LOOK of renders with the update? Friend and I were talking and she had two renders - one done the other day, and the other with the update. Same lights, settings etc. And the second render is noticeably different in look - much brighter and more vibrant. 

  • nonesuch00nonesuch00 Posts: 18,714
    jakiblue said:

    Has anyone noticed an actual difference in the LOOK of renders with the update? Friend and I were talking and she had two renders - one done the other day, and the other with the update. Same lights, settings etc. And the second render is noticeably different in look - much brighter and more vibrant. 

    I haven't. I've notice it  renders brighter much faster and converges much faster. Since it converges faster it will seem to be brighter & vibranter than before if you have a slow render PC and often cancel your renders before they get even near 50%.

  • mjc1016mjc1016 Posts: 15,001
    Praxis said:

    FYI: SLI may cause big slowdown:

    System: 2 x GTX780 3GB, 6-Core i7, Win7 64bit.

    I upgraded my Nvidia drivers from 364.72 to 376.33, and DAZ Studio from 4.8.0.59 to 4.9.3.116, and IRay renders became a bit slower, and interactive IRay Viewport DrawStyle became unusably slow.

    Found that something (the driver upgrade?) had enabled SLI.  I don't remember doing that, but may have left it like that while testing in DS 4.8, with which SLI On/Off did'nt make much difference.

    Used the NVIDIA Control Panel to turn SLI Off, hit [Apply] and closed it.

    Re-ran my tests in DS 4.9.3.116, and ALL IS NOW GOOD:  Both IRay rendering and IRay interactive viewing are about 10% faster than they were in DS 4.8

     

     

    For Iray it is always been said to turn off SLI, because of possible conflicts...and after searching the Nvidia fourms the other day, I found that the biggest reason, for turning it off: major slowdowns.

  • kyoto kidkyoto kid Posts: 41,838
    edited January 2017
    Taozen said:
    pds said:
    fastbike1 said:

    I'm not seeing that impact at all. Also, the release notes lead me to believe thatthere will be less noise in dimly lighted areas than before. The attached render was stopped at 86% with a 95% convergence setting. Looks clean to me.

    I find that it is faster, but beware the convergence. 95% convergence is rather grainy now compared to the previous version. I'm now upping the convergence to 99% where I would never do this on the older version.

     

     

    I'm curious if you were to run the same scene in the previous version of Studio whether the cove would look the same. Another person commented previously that he had experienced a less desirable result with a cyc wall cove.

    I did a test in CPU mode of the same scene in both the new and the previous version, both using default Iray settings. The new version took almost twice the time and used almost twice as many iterations before it finished.

    ...so for CPU rendering performace is worse in the latest version? That is not an improvement.  Guess I'll give it a pass and stay with 4.8

    Post edited by kyoto kid on
  • fastbike1 said:

    I'm not seeing that impact at all. Also, the release notes lead me to believe that there will be less noise in dimly lighted areas than before. The attached render was stopped at 86% with a 95% convergence setting. Looks clean to me.

    I find that it is faster, but beware the convergence. 95% convergence is rather grainy now compared to the previous version. I'm now upping the convergence to 99% where I would never do this on the older version.

     

     

    That does look good. But if you look at mikek and KA1's posts, I'm experiencing the exact same thing they are. The way iRay is computing convergence seems to have changed and is ending the render quicker. Perhaps it doesn't happen all the time, but it does happen.

     

  • mjc1016mjc1016 Posts: 15,001
    kyoto kid said:
    Taozen said:
    pds said:
    fastbike1 said:

    I'm not seeing that impact at all. Also, the release notes lead me to believe thatthere will be less noise in dimly lighted areas than before. The attached render was stopped at 86% with a 95% convergence setting. Looks clean to me.

    I find that it is faster, but beware the convergence. 95% convergence is rather grainy now compared to the previous version. I'm now upping the convergence to 99% where I would never do this on the older version.

     

     

    I'm curious if you were to run the same scene in the previous version of Studio whether the cove would look the same. Another person commented previously that he had experienced a less desirable result with a cyc wall cove.

    I did a test in CPU mode of the same scene in both the new and the previous version, both using default Iray settings. The new version took almost twice the time and used almost twice as many iterations before it finished.

    ...so for CPU rendering performace is worse in the latest version? That is not an improvement.  Guess I'll give it a pass and stay with 4.8

    I've only noticed longer render times with the Spectral Rendering enabled.  Most of my scenes are done CPU only...a 1 GB card doesn't hold much wink (although I can get more into my 1 GB in Linux than Windows can...it's still not all that much, though).

  • TaozTaoz Posts: 10,232
    kyoto kid said:
    Taozen said:
    pds said:
    fastbike1 said:

    I'm not seeing that impact at all. Also, the release notes lead me to believe thatthere will be less noise in dimly lighted areas than before. The attached render was stopped at 86% with a 95% convergence setting. Looks clean to me.

    I find that it is faster, but beware the convergence. 95% convergence is rather grainy now compared to the previous version. I'm now upping the convergence to 99% where I would never do this on the older version.

     

     

    I'm curious if you were to run the same scene in the previous version of Studio whether the cove would look the same. Another person commented previously that he had experienced a less desirable result with a cyc wall cove.

    I did a test in CPU mode of the same scene in both the new and the previous version, both using default Iray settings. The new version took almost twice the time and used almost twice as many iterations before it finished.

    ...so for CPU rendering performace is worse in the latest version? That is not an improvement.  Guess I'll give it a pass and stay with 4.8

    It's possible that the higher amount of iterations is because of different default settings, this again could be to compensate for the increased graininess which some report about. I'm going to do some more CPU tests to compare render time versus quality, but I'm not sure which type of render is best for this.

  • 3-D Arena3-D Arena Posts: 199
    edited January 2017

    I think upgrading my drivers screwed something up.  Everything looks fine - except Studio.  Now it's rendering crazy slow (30 minutes in at 2% on a scene I've rendered a few times before), iray preview is grainy and never clears up.  The only thing that lets me work is using SecondCircle's lighting.

    I reverted back to the previous Studio version as well.  Studio is showing that it's working off the Nvidia card (gtx 770 with 4G vram) but it's as if the driver isn't optimized for Studio any longer.  Is there anyone who knows what I should look at to fix?  I know it's vague, but I am PC ignorant when it comes to hardware. :-D  I'd take it to be looked at but I'm not sure where to take a pc for this type of issue LOL.

    Post edited by 3-D Arena on
Sign In or Register to comment.