DAZ Iray renders taking longer than usual
Hey, fellow renderers.
So lately I've been concerned about my renders and the time they're taking to complete. Before anyone asks, I have a GTX 1060 (6GB) which is the sole thing I use to render (not my CPU, just the GPU. The CPU I have is an i5 2nd Gen). I've seen people with Maxwell cards (GTX 970) rendering images which take up a lot lesser time than mine.
First I thought it was the resolution of my HDRI environment maps. I lowered that, but got no luck. Second, I started using lesser lights and sometimes no lights (just the HDRI) for rendering. Still no luck. I even tried to lower the resolution of the image I was rendering (before it was 4000x4000, then I tried 1000x1000). And now I'm frustrated so I'm writing here if someone can help me.
Thanks in advance.

Comments
Are you running 372.90 or later driver?
Two questions: Are you putting more figures into the render than you have been previously? Obviously, the more crowded the scene, the longer it will take to render.
Are you checking to see what other programs are running in the background - anything that would use your GPU?
Wishing you the best with this.
Neither. Using the 378.92 driver, as told by the Geforce Experience software on my PC.
1st question: No, just using one figure for the render. Never used more than 2 figures in a render, but I mainly render 1 figure per scene.
2nd question: Yes, I'm very concerned about programs running in the background. I mainly have one program running other than DAZ and that's GPUz to monitor my GPU temperature. Other than that, the normal background programs, like, sound card driver, nVidia Settings, IDM and 2 or more others. Do I need to quit these as well before rendering? That shouldn't be a problem. Should it?
Download GPU-Z to see if your GPU is turning on in the first place. Iray will fallback to CPU despite checking GPU-only if there's some issue with loading the resources onto GPU. 6GB should be more than enough, but I recently hit my own 4GB limit with relatively simple scenes...
Always have it on while I'm rendering. The GPU does turn on, that's not the problem. The highest memory my renders have hit are like, 4GB, and that too only when more than 1 figures were in the scene.