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..that is just with the scene open in Daz, no rendering. I only have an old 1 GB 460 which is pretty much uselss for rendering so all my Iray work is done on the CPU and system memory.
I agree with you that fitting any scene into a 1GB card would be extremely challenging given that general overhead can eat up quite a lot of that. 2GB would be a minimum for a simple scene, but 4GB+ is better. All the same, as I said before, just because the scene file takes up almost 9GB in Daz Studio, that gives little indication of the amount of VRAM required. I had a scene that when loaded took around that, and rose to 12GB during rendering, however the scene easily fitted into the 4GB of my GTX970. As such hphoenix is probably correct that your railway scene would almost certainly fit onto an 8GB GPU card. It might even render on a 4GB card if you downsized the skin textures, or at the very least stripped out the normal/SSS etc maps. There is very little skin showing in your scene, and in my experience it is the huge 4K x 4K skin maps with their bump/specular etc supporting maps that eat up the majority of VRAM. The remaining maps for the props, and particularly any geometry is pretty lightweight in comparison.
the world of video cards isn't one I'm too familiar with, so bare with me if this is a dumb question.
Speaking purely on the VRAM
Is 2 4Gig cards the equivelent of 1 8gig card (all other things being the same)? Is it Program/os specific...IF so, does Daz/Iray see it as such?
It needs to load the textures into both cards individual VRAM for them both to be able to render. I wish it worked additively, I would throw my old 960 in with my 1070 if it did work that way.
Where is said script?
https://www.daz3d.com/iray-memory-assistant
They are not the same at all. With 2 4GB cards you have the combined CUDA cores to help you with the rendering, but the scene has to fit into 4GB of VRAM, because the whole scene must be on both cards, not half on one, and half on the other. If the VRAM required exceeds 4GB, you will be rendering with CPU only and both the video cards will be sitting twiddling their thumbs.
1 8GB card will only give you the cores of that card, however the scene can require 8GB of VRAM and still you would be able to render using the GPU.
...well considering the weather depicted in the scene, don't think any of the female characters in the scene would be into wearing bikinis (unless maybe Mr. Bond was on that incoming train). ;-)
Everything in that scene was manually converted to Iray shaders (for the female characters I was able to use the default Iray G2F skin). I made sure there was no SSS as at the time I did this, Iray did not support it. I think the real memory hogs are still the the misty environment (not using the Iray fog or environment effects cameras as those were not out yet) and emissive lights.
I could see the fog and emissive lights having a significant effect on the render time, but I would doubt they would have much impact on the VRAM memory use.
...when I turn the volume mist off, the scene drops significantly in memory load
Yes, but that is system memory, not VRAM, the effect is likely to be different, though I am not sure to what amount.
..again for now I am stuck with CPU rendering which uses system memory.
It would be nice if there was some simple formula or value one could use to roughly determine the difference in VRAM and system memory loads (within say ±0.05 GB).
Hello People!
After rendering in 3Delight for a long time, I am planning to switch to Iray. I have tried some Iray renders, but due to the lack of a dedicated Nvidia GPU, it took almost ages to render a perfect image. I have attached some photos for your reference. The first batman test took a long time.. a very long time to render(I dont remember, but it was frustrating). Postworked in photoshop. The background is a backdrop using 2D image. Complete rendered image size is 2000x2000 pixels.
But this image of Batman and Killer Crock took just 2 hours or so to render completely. Its 2500x2083 pixels i believe. The third image of Batman again took around 2-3 hours but was still grainy. I changed the Render Quality settings and there was a difference, but quality compromised. You can notice the grainy and unrendered/derendered areas on the cowl.
And now, I am confused as to where I am going wrong.
Most of my scenes will have 3-4 characters at the max and most of the times I will be using 2D images as backdrops. Image resolution will never exceed 2500x2500. Volumetric effects will be photoshoped. I have a very basic computer with i3 4th gen CPU and 8 GB RAM. Now, my question is: Shall I go for the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 one? Or it will be okay to get the any of the 1050Ti/1060 ones? And do I also need to upgrade my PSU (using 450W at present)?
Thanks!
I just broke down and finally bought an NVIDIA card and went with the Zotac GEFORCE GTX 1070 mini on Amazon U.S. for $334.95, which includes a 5 year warranty, https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01LLAJ8PU/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o04_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 ; I've had it installed for two weeks now and so, far I'm really happy with it, especially since it runs a lot quieter and draws less power than my old Radeon card.
Wow! on Amazon.com $334.99 looks cheap. When I look for it on Amazon.in (I am in India), it becomes double :O
Reading through the thread has been really helpful, but I wonder if people could give more specific timeframes for renders. I'm right now using a Radeon 6870 (which I see now I bought in 2012...) that took over a day to render what I imagine is a pretty simple (maybe moderate?) scene with two characters and a background. So basically I won't be rendering anything until I figure out how to do it more efficiently. This is currently a hobby for me, but I'd like to not leave the computer on for a day. I'm looking for something in the $200 range but it sounds like it might be worth it to save up for the GTX 1070? In general, how quickly do scenes render with that? How does it compare in speed to the 900 range?
much appreciated!
@rustaj
There aren't any GTX cards ion the $200 range, at least none worth owning. $400 is probably more realistic. Your day long render will probably reduce to 2-4 hours (or less).
My mind has been blown...what am I going to do with all that time now? (Thanks for the quick info!)
Spend more time re-rendering things because you want to try it again with some slight changes. The biggest change I've seen to my workflow since adding an NVIDIA card is that I'm a lot more inclined to tweak things at the render stage that I used to automatically fix in post.
My computer is 3 years old this month. It's an ASUS G10AC-US009S. This is the information copied off the site that gives the specs for my computer. Based on this, if I upgrade my graphics card, will I have to also get a bigger power supply? And what does 'NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760 3 GB GDDR5' mean? What is 3 GB GDDR5? I thought my graphics card is only a 1GB card? I'm confused by that. But based on this, what could I get?
Processor
Intel Core i7-4770 3.40GHz
64 bit Quad-Core Processor
32 GB DDR3
1600Mhz
Storage
1 TB
Optical Drive
Blu-Ray Combo
Graphics
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760 3 GB GDDR5
Power Supply
500W
CPU Type Intel Core i7 4th Gen
CPU Speed 4770 (3.40 GHz)
L3 Cache Per CPU 8 MB
64 bit Quad-Core Processor
Graphics
GPU/VGA Type
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760
Memory
Memory Capacity 32 GB DDR3
Memory Speed DDR3 1600
Storage
HDD 1 TB HDD RPM 7200rpm
Back Panel Ports
Video Ports
1 VGA, 1 DVI, 1 HDMI, 1 Display port
Operating System
Windows 8 64-Bit
4GB for rendering is iMO too little 6GB is barely sufficient.
However, 4GB will at least let you do simpler scenes, especially if you stay away from windows 10; windows 10 steals RAM. (I was going to buy another card before realising that; i'll do it when Nvidia fix the issue.)
Edit:
https://www.geforce.com/hardware/desktop-gpus/geforce-gtx-760/specifications
2GB according to Nvidia.
Oh, all this time I thought it was 1GB. Huh. Thanks! Lame, but not as lame as I've always thought!
It would make a decent card to drive your monitor; if you can simply add a card for rendering.
You don't specify your monitor's resolution, but I use a 970 to drive 3 x 2560x1440; it does ok. I have a separate card for rendering; my 970 will work harder than your 760 if all its doing is driving one. The trouble is, it's so easy to start adding stuff, more monitors, cards, ram, etc...
Then the bill arrives. /shudder
The monitor is older Asus. It's set at its highest resolution which is 1680x1050 Landscape orientation. Does that help? I didn't know you could have separate cards for a monitor and rendering. Yeah, my husband would notice if I started adding stuff, then he'd start deleting me.
Also this product can be a help if your GPU can't handle your scene in the normal way.
https://www.daz3d.com/scene-optimizer
I actually own this....I'm always surprised what I own when ppl provide a link and it says 'purchased'.
I'll def leave myself a sticky note to use it. Thanks...
There is also a free script to help with this: https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/137161/reduce-texture-sizes-easily-with-this-script/p1
It depends on your motherboard and power supply; it might be enough, but imo the PSU is a much underrated component, trying to save money on it is a false economy.
No idea what your motherboard is; to find out you could open the case and see if the model name and number is obvious. Even if spec states it to be something, I would check as changes can be made, and substitutions made: legitimate and not so much.
Hi folks, I have always been a "lurker" on forums, but after my agonising experience of a 22 hr overnight rendering of only six frames of a 30 frame animate2 animation of a background (Daz "level 19") with one G8 model with Sci-Fi pilot uniform jogging toward a created camera 1; I thought would upgrade my 4gb Geforce GTX 960OC to a Geforce GTX 1060 with 6GB. I thought the $300 upgrade was all I could afford to "test" on a Bestbuy purchase. I thought if I didn't get at least a 3X or 4X increase in rendering speed I could return it.
Well, by increasing the CUDA rating from 1024 on my GTX 960, and 4GB of memory TO CUDA 1280 and memory to 6GB on the newly purchased GTX 1060, the render speed increased 10X. After selling my 960 on eBay, I think the $200 "upgrade" was worth it.
Desktop: Win10 64 bit, i7-4770 @ 3.4GHz, 16GB Ram NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 (GDDR5 4GB dedicated) DS4.10 64 bit