General GPU/testing discussion from benchmark thread
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Some notes/clarifications regarding Iray's various modes of rendering operation (at least as currently implemented in Daz Studio.)
Iray actually has TWO distinct types of operational modes governing it's behavior while rendering a scene:
Render Mode (either "Photoreal" or "Interactive") determines the underlying algorithms used during a render, and is what ulrimately determines the visual quality of a given render. Scheduling Mode (either "Batch" or "Interactive" - yes, both parameters confusingly have an "Interactive" mode option) determines how iteration workloads are split up across enabled render devices, and how quickly intermediate updates get sent back to the central framebuffer for providing active visual feedback.
Each of these modes are usable across their various possible combinations (4 in total.) ie - in order of least to most responsive:
For the people (eg. bluejaunte) describing little to no visual change between "Photoreal" and "Interactive" rendering mode, the reason for this is because you are mistaking going from Iray via the Render button ("Photoreal" rendering mode, "Batch" scheduling) to Iray via an active viewport (still "Photoreal" rendering mode, but with "Interactive" scheduling) as switching to "Interactive" rendering mode. Unless you go and explicitly change Render Settings > Editor > Render Mode to "Interactive", you are technically not using Interactive rendering mode.
For positive confirmation of which scheduling mode you're in, look for one of the following lines in your log file:
1. Batch scheduling, Photoreal rendering mode
2. Batch scheduling, Interactive rendering mode
3. Interactive scheduling, Photoreal rendering mode
4. Interactive scheduling, Interactive rendering mode
Thanks, makes a bit more sense now. What I don't get is why I don't see a difference in Iray Preview even after switching to Interactive though. I do see a difference in the normal render. Like, it's actually a mess. The face material renders completely differently than the rest of the body.
What exactly is Interactive supposed to do?
Did you change Render Mode to "Interactive" via the Render Settings tab or the Draw Settings tab? (forgot to mention that...)
Render Mode > Render Mode in Render Settings. Draw settings tab, where is that?
Oh I see, separate tab I need to load through Window > Panes... interesting.
Yep, now it looks crappy in the viewport too. Which still begs the question, what the hell am I supposed to do with Interactive in the first place?
Yay, upteenth edit. Can I just say that Interactive is actually giving me slower viewport navigation as well?
How numerous/powerful are your graphics cards? The main feature draw of Interactive scheduling/rendering (other than severely dumbed down graphics quality in exchange for actually measurable FPS - imo a wholly unnecessary feature with the current state of even moderate performance graphics hardware) is how quickly camera movements register when your rendering is being split across multiple graphics cards.
1x 2080 TI.
Yeah, speaking as a fellow member of the single overpowered graphics card club, Iray's current implementations of interaction-optimized alternate rendering modes are pretty much useless.
Btw for the person earlier lamenting about not being able to save the contents of eg. an Iray viewport render, next time you have something you want to save:
Personally, I never use "Interactive" mode since I consider it to be somewhat useless. Too many shortcuts that in many cases make it nothing like the final render.
And like I said, I think the "Realtime" mode is a deprecated (aka, no longer available) mode that was nothing more than a fast rasterizer that used OpenGL, not anything like the new RTX ray tracing features. In fact, I think "Realtime" mode is referenced in some old 2016 Iray documentation, but not in newer docs, so I think it's no longer relevant, IMO.
So for me that again brings us back to the Iray Photoreal preview mode, and the possibility that RTX support (ray tracing, de-noising, etc.) will improve that. Hopefully, when and if things improve in that area in future months somebody with a 20xx series card can post some before and after GIF's to show how response has improved. Fingers crossed.
Hi, I read here several topics regarding performance / system requirements because I want to build a new hardware system.
Make it sense to buy 2 GTX 1070 (each $300) as a starting point? Or is it totally nonsense regarding current hardware and DAZ trend?
(I also read something about RTX isn't officially supported.)
I looked into galleries and I am really impressed by some (few) of them. Unfortunately there are no specs mentioned like CPU, GPU(s), render kind and time (also GPU RAM usage would be interesting) to get an impression / estimation what can be reached and how. Is there a gallery which such data?
Sorry, I stopped getting updates on this thread. It always very hard to recommend any one GPU to somebody because everyone's use case is different. The amount of VRAM is a big deal, as this directly effects how much stuff you can place in a given scene. However, 8GB is decent enough, and only a very small number of GPUs offer more.
Rule of thumb is this: CUDA cores can stack, but VRAM does not. The scene you create must fit into each indidual GPU's memory. So if you happen to have a GPU with 4GB and one with 8GB (just as example), and you creat a 6GB scene, then only the 8GB GPU will run. The 4GB GPU will do nothing at all. So with both GPUs having 8GB, at least you don't have to worry about that as much, though the GPU that drives your monitor will have a small amount less because it must run the monitor.
I think I read somewhere that two 1070s are about equal to one 1080ti, plus the 1080ti has 11GB of VRAM. So if that is possible, I would get the 1080ti over dual 1070's. The 2080 is a bit faster than the 1080ti at Iray as well, so a single a 2080 would be a great option.
There is the aspect that RTX is coming to Daz Studio *soon*. (No date is known.) Currently, the RTX will work with the Daz 4.11 Beta. This may not be official, but the beta is pretty darn stable for most people. However, the new ray tracing cores on RTX are not supported...YET. Once these get supported, then RTX cards will receive some very good performce boosts. And RTX cards are already quite fast with Iray. Nvidia is releasing an updated Iray in May. Daz Studio has to take this new Iray and integrate it into Daz Studio, that will not happen over night, but should be about a month or two. Then Daz Studio will fully support the RTX lineup.
So with that in mind, I would suggest looking at RTX instead. Instead of two 1070's, a single 2070 or even 2080 if you can go that far, would easily beat two 1070's by a wide margin in performance. Personally, I think that RTX enabled will offer around 2-3 times faster performance than RTX off for normal users.So if you add that on top of the already strong performance that RTX has, yeah, that looks very good.
Fast is only useful when it is accurate.
It really depends on what the user deems is "good enough". If the end result is close enough to fool most people even if not exactly accurate, then who really cares? Hollywood gets away with a LOT of totally inaccurate effects all the time, like car explosions and bullets that brightly spark when they hit anything. Its even got to a point where some people actually believe these kinds of effects are how they really look in real life. People like the Mythbusters made a living off debunking Hollywood effects.
And Iray has its own struggles with accuracy in places. Iray still has great difficulty with something as basic as fire. In most cases, in order to create a believable flame, users have to resort to faking it with a picture of a flame on something like a plane primitive.
Meanwhile, gaming engine are built around creating effects like cool looking .flames.
A 5x improvement would be great!
At least they're publically saying that the RTX support to Iray is coming.
2-3x with or without Octane?
I don't have a RTX card yet, but I'm trying to save something up!
Now I've understood!
That's great then! Can't wait to get that GPU and to see those software improvements!
I'll buy either a 2060 or a 2070 in July/October I hope.
I've not fully understood this A chip version: how could you discern them from normal-clocked cheaper variants?
There is no way to know without taking the GPU apart and looking at the chip itself! The only other way would be to read up on reviews for that particular GPU model and see if they mention it. However, you usually pay a premium for the higher clocked versions anyway, so in general the cheapest cards are probably the ones with the slower chip.
And I may have got it backwards, the A chip is the faster one. Gah...this is confusing!
Here is a short rundown on what is happening with a brief history.
https://www.techradar.com/news/nvidia-to-stop-making-rtx-2080-and-2070-gpus-that-arent-so-well-suited-to-overclocking
Basically it comes down to what you want to pay for. If you want the faster clocked cards, you are going to pay a premium, and that is not going to change.
So, I've found this recent article: http://blog.smarttec.com.au/category/maxwell-render/
Is it reliable?
It talks of this Iray 2019.1.0: does this support tensor cores?
Because he has also done many tests (in the middle of the article), and the average improvement in standard scenes is 20-30%.
Sounds reliable and in line with other sources (raytracing vs shading debate). The typical Daz scene is not overly complex so we might have to accept that we won't get immense improvement with RTX. In my own stuff which is mostly portrait style promos with simple backgrounds this will likely be very evident.
Other way round. Simple scenes will have less raytracing and more shading. That's basically the two things that are happening when rendering a scene, and RT cores will only help with raytracing. That's how I understand it at least.
Sorry if it's in Italian...but is it huge??? :O
They specifically say, in the new drivers description, that they improve performances in DAZ STUDIO!!!!
The latest Nvidia Studio Driver release or SRD (formerly known as Creator Ready Drivers) 430.86 does indeed brag about DAZ Studio support. From the press release:
Daz 3D Daz Studio
Daz 3D’s latest version of their popular Daz Studio Pro (4.11.0366 Beta) 3D creation tool showcases their newest feature, dForce hair simulation. As Daz 3D has rolled out their dForce cloth simulations, and now their newest dForce hair as well, the GPU is key to simulate the movement and physics of hair and cloth with a level of realism and performance that just wouldn’t be possible otherwise. With the power of NVIDIA’s GPUs, creators can also accelerate their compute intensive workflows with NVIDIA's IRAY technology, the native renderer in Daz Studio.
“Powerful GPUs bring more to the table than just pretty pictures. Within Daz Studio, we're not only rendering stunning images and animations with the Iray render engine, we are leveraging the GPU to perform incredibly complex calculations for simulating cloth and hair. As one of the only solutions available that provides Iray for free to end users, it is critical that we offer reliable functionality to a huge number of end user environments. NVIDIA Studio Driver program is key to helping us deliver on that.” -- Steve Spencer, General Manager and VP of Marketing, Daz3D
However NSD support is about software compatiblity - not (necessarily) performance differences. Having your program featured with an SRD release just means that folks over at Nvidia have gone through the trouble of validating full software compatiblity between a specific version of your program and the specific driver version being released. It's a guarantee against software incompatibilities on current shipping versions, not an indicator of better performance (unless previous driver releases were plagued by bugs harming that specific program's performance stats.)
I spent some time late last week on my varous test systems benchmarking between 430.86 SRD, 430.86 GRD (Game Ready Driver aka normal drive release) and the most recent previous driver release 430.64, and Iray performance in Daz Studio is identical between all of them.
There are (at minimum) two distinct ways of evaluating complexity in a Daz Studio scene:
1. computational complexity of lights/shaders used in each scene object
2. quantitative complexity (technically quantity) of scene objects visible
RTCores will accelerate the former, but not necessarily the latter (only if the latter is a bunch of objects best described by the former.) So if you spend your time rendering scenes with indirectly lit, complexly shaded objects like people in closeup (human skin shading is one of the most computationally complex cg tasks out there) you should see substantial gains with RTCore acceleration. If you spend your time rendering lots of directly lit, simply shaded objects (like opaque clothing or rooms filled with office furniture - ie. the sort of stuff this particular tester's rendering tasks seem to be primarily made up of) RTCore gains should be only very small.
That sort of contradicts what I had heard before and also what the Maxwell article says.
That does not sound like a portrait of a character where the skin shader is the most demanding thing. It sounds like lots of object with lots of light bouncing around and hence lots of raytracing. I guess we will just have to wait and see. Shouldn't be too long now.
I trust RayDAnt more than a stranger who writes an article, and they haven't tested a single person!
Thank you for your precious explanations!! :D
I'm gonna have soon a RTX 2060 (I hope), and it should already be a revolution compared to my 1060 3Gb.
What you've said describes most of my scenes, so I really hope to see that improvement! And it seems closer and closer.
I like scenes with closeup characters and a lot of light sources and reflections.
It's a good thing in any case that they care about Daz Studio! I'm always afraid when I upgrade my drivers, because of what has happened with some versions, at least they're checking the compatibility now!
Then I read they've improved something for dForce, am I right?
I see Daz is moving in that direction. It's useful, and it distinguishes it from other software.
Yet, I still mostly need fast beautiful renders xD
I do tend to agree with the article posted. I noticed the article is also at migenius, and in fact references meginius for its benchmarks, so I think migenius is actually the source of the article. I find it very interesting that the Titan Volta renders so much faster than any RTX card in the migenius bench, in spite of not having any RT cores. This tells us something about the pure computational power of the Titan V, and I mentioned before that the RTX actually is lacking some of the features that the Titan V has. Its too bad there is no such thing as a "Titan V RTX". That would be one heck of a card. Its also too bad that nobody with a Titan V has posted a time on the benchmarks here. I know one user here owned a Titan V, but at the time Iray did not support it. They sure did complain about how "ugly" Genesis 8 was in my benchmark.
However, I think it is unwise to underestimate what happens in some Daz scenes. We have a lot of 3D environments here, and while they may not be super high poly, they are not exactly low poly, either. Gaming assets usually have much lower poly counts, for example. You also have light bouncing around these environments, and that can be a time consuming task itself, don't forget about Iray grain/noise. We all know just how much Iray hates low light indoor environments. I believe RTX will make this sort of render much less painful to do. I think we have all done that render where Iray never even reaches 1% because of how the light bounces infinitely around.
I think my bench scene specifically will be an interesting test of what RTX can do. I think it might benefit more than SY's scene.
There is one other interesting bit of info in that article I'd like to mention. It states that even without RT acceleration, Iray 2019 is still faster than the current version. If this is true, that is great news for everybody. That means that people who do not have RTX cards may still see some performance improvement.
Are we currently using this Iray 2019?