What are the advantages of having much ram?

Comments

• nonesuch00 Posts: 18,723

  January 2017

  If you are talking video card RAM two things have to happed if you are using DAZ Studio:

  1. It has to be a video card of a new enough model fron nVidia to support iRay

  2. It has to have enough video card RAM to process the scene you will be rendering in iRay. If it has not enough RAM DS will CPU render instead and instead of your GPU render being done in less than two hours and being converged your CPU render will take days and be very, very, slow to converge so video card ram is very important for render speed.
• BeeMKay Posts: 7,019

  January 2017

  Ram is important for fitting the scene. A singe G3 with hair and clothing can take up anywhere between 1.5 and 3 GB of that precious RAM space. So if you want to render a larger scene, more RAM is essential, especially if you use Iray and you go to CPU rendering. In that case, the entire scene that would be sent to the graphic card is added on the already existing data in xour RAM.

  More RAM has no influence on the render speed, unless you have so little RAM that your system is constantly swapping; in that case, your viewport is already molasses.

  so, to answer your question, your 4GB Xenon setup would probably render a single character scene in Iray, or a 2 character scene in 3DL, but chances are that DAZ will crah because the system is running out of memory.

  I used to have a 16GB system, but updated to 32GB, because of this.
• marble Posts: 7,500

  January 2017

  Reading the responses above I think it might be useful to distinguish more clearly between Video RAM (VRAM) on the GPU card and main system RAM. I have a GTX 970 GPU with 4GB VRAM and am constantly hitting the limit and having to remove figures/props etc. to get below the 4GB and prevent it dropping out to CPU render. On the other hand, I have 16GB of system RAM and have never noticed any problem. So the question for me is: what would possibly use all 16GB of system RAM?
• Toonces Posts: 919

  January 2017

  These are my opinions:

  I have 16 GB of ram. It's plenty if you just use Daz app by itself. Even if you upgrade you're video cards to 8 GB, you still want to keep scene within the 8 GB limit to allow your GPU to render.

  The only exception is if you have a large scene, exceeding ~14 GB and you want your CPU to render it. Clearly it won't fit on your GPU so CPU is only option. In that case having more than 16 GB of ram would be helpful to ensure that your CPU could handle it from system memory.

  I figure if I ever need a CPU render for something that big...I'll pay the $50 for an extra 8 GB of ram at that point (but not before exhausting tricks to reduce memory footprint of scene).
• nonesuch00 Posts: 18,723

  January 2017 edited January 2017

  Actually I've 16GB system computer RAM (not video card RAM) and I have hit the RAM limit quite a few times even for CPU rendering. When you have 16GB system ram and CPU render you only really have 12 - 13 GB RAM to use in DAZ Studio.

  You should try for 32GB system RAM and 8GB video card RAM. From a affordability perspective you probably won't be willing to pay for more than that.

  Post edited by nonesuch00 on January 2017
• AndyS Posts: 1,447

  January 2017

  First of all you should keep in mind:
  If the memory need of the render exceeds the Vram of the graphix card, iRay quits down to CPU render only.

  So having a scene with some G3 characters easily drives the best available GPU card over its limit. You can try to reduce the resolution of the characters (at least if they are located in the background).
  But if you want to make those details really 3D-visible as the profile of the tires in that render,

  

  which is done with displacement and the necessary Displacement SubD, it will drive the memory occupation up to 20GB.

  Until I increased my HD cache those renders ever crashed.
  Increasing the system RAM of my computer would be a good idea to achieve some percent of render speed. At the moment I have 8GB system RAM and a total of 40GB possible HD cache.
• nonesuch00 Posts: 18,723

  January 2017

  AndyS said:

  First of all you should keep in mind:
  If the memory need of the render exceeds the Vram of the graphix card, iRay quits down to CPU render only.

  So having a scene with some G3 characters easily drives the best available GPU card over its limit. You can try to reduce the resolution of the characters (at least if they are located in the background).
  But if you want to make those details really 3D-visible as the profile of the tires in that render,

  

  which is done with displacement and the necessary Displacement SubD, it will drive the memory occupation up to 20GB.

  Until I increased my HD cache those renders ever crashed.
  Increasing the system RAM of my computer would be a good idea to achieve some percent of render speed. At the moment I have 8GB system RAM and a total of 40GB possible HD cache.

  Where is that sand texture from? I am not happy with a sand texture I am currently using.
• AndyS Posts: 1,447

  January 2017

  It is from FirstBasion's Rolling Plains. But I changed diffuse to pure color and applied real displacement map.