Is 6gb of RAM enough for renders through DAZ?
cjrosdat4
Posts: 20
in The Commons
My laptop has 6GB of RAM installed, I have also heard it is paramount that I have at least 16GB of RAM installed on my machine. Do I need more RAM for my laptop? It is a Pavillion HP Laptop with an Intel Core i3 7th Gen.
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Yes. It makes a huge difference in how much Daz can handle and how quickly it can deal with it
6GB works, but it is far from ideal. Daz generally needs more memory for all the assets and textures, and once your regular memory runs out, your computer will start using Virtual Memory, which basically means it will start to use a big chunk of your hard disk for memory. And that means your computer will start moving memory to hard disk and loading memory from hard disk, and your computer will get noticably slower.
So, it works, yes, but it will be slow and clunky. Forget about multitasking, even doing something simple like running a browser in the background can result in unexpected crashes. Daz Studio really benefits from a using a decent dedicated machine.
..depends, if you are rendering the basic garden variety version of 3DL then you probably are OK. if you plan to use 3DL with UE, you will run into issues where the process will bog down and possibly end up in swap mode (using the Virtual Memory partition on your HDD) which is even slower as its based on the seek time and speed of the HDD.
If you are looking to render in Iray be prepared for slow render times as that 7th generation i3 only has two CPU cores. Windows and system utilities usually take up about 1 GB of system memory so in essence you only have about 5 GB to run the programme and render process with, which most certainly would result in the process using the Virtual Memory on the HDD. I had 12 GB (10.99 after Windows 7 and utilities) on my system with a 4 core hyperthreading i7 (8 threads) which I upgraded to 24 GB, swapped out the old i7 for a 6 core 12 thread Xeon, and replaced the 1 GB Fermi GPU with a Maxwell Titan-X. Before the upgrade, even rendering a moderate sized scene in Iray using CPU mode took hours and occasionally went into swap mode. Keep in mind that when rendering on the CPU not only does the render process take up memory, but the uncompressed scene file as well.
Do you want to render with Iray? Because there is difference between RAM and VRAM, or rendering with your CPU or GPU. Do you have a videocard?
I got gtx 1060 6gig. I don't load much. I usually use layering and hdri/backgrounds for my settings. Also dreamlights products help alot for scenes. They cut back on the resources, and renders are nice and fast.
6GB is just barely over what Windows10 needs to be efficient(4GB). Can you use DAZ? Yes, but it will quickly fill up available RAM and begin to swap memory blocks in and out of hard drive storage. That cuts your productivity by like 50 times! And I wouldn't even think of using IRay without a suitable graphics card unless you're rendering a very simple scene and need to busy yourself in the garden while it renders.
One DAZ person with simple texture and a simple backdrop image would work OK, but if you get into multiple people with clothes in environments with lots of textures, complicated textures and many lights you'll run into a molasses field with snowshoes on.
I gave up on my old laptop(maxed out at 4GB). Yeah, DAZ barely worked on it.
Even with 8GB on my old desktop I quickly ran into limitations with more than three older generation figures (Michael4 or Genesis) with clothes and complex environment.
My new machine has 32GB and think I have room to spread my wings now. But before I got it to 32GB I had 16GB for a while and that was quite enough for some nicely complicated scenes with modern DAZ people(G2, G3, G8).
But if your 6GB laptop is all you have then yes, DAZ will work but you need to keep its limitations in mind or be very patient.
HOWEVER, do not despair! It might be possible to breathe new life into your laptop by increasing RAM or replacing the spinning hard drive (HD) with a solid-state drive (SSD) It's amazing what an SSD can do for the speed of a slow laptop. Yeah, your DAZ will still need to swap RAM in and out of storage but the SSD storage speed is many many times faster than the HD. A 500GB SSD of good quality can be had for about $75 (US) double that for each doubled size of storage capacity. I used a "Crucial MX500 500GB" SSD in my very old laptop. Very happy!
Replacing the SSD requires a few simple tools (tiny screwdriver), and a USB to SATA disk interface cable or a 2.5 inch external drive enclosure, to attach the SSD to the laptop while cloning the internal HD to the SSD. You can buy a cable or external enclosure separately for about $10. Or some SSDs are sold with a screwdriver and a cable in a kit. And you'll need software to do the cloning. Crucial provides a free download of the cloning software if you use their SSD. The cloning process is simple, just carefully follow directions. Or find a friend who's more comfortable doing this sort of thing.
I used to do Iray renderings with a 4GB Card. It worked, but I was not quite happy with it.
Please note OP hasn't specified if they have a videocard :) It's a laptop... not all have them and use integrated graphics for instance.
I don't think I have a video card. Do you have a recommendation on a video card for the type of machine I have?
I don't think I have a video card. Do you have a recommendation on a video card for the type of machine I have?
@cjrosdat4 For Iray renders (which is what most products use) you definitely need a videocard, but if you have a laptop, installing a videocard is usually impossible. Only if you have a thunderbolt 3 port, you might be able to use an eGPU solution to connect a videocard stand-alone from your laptop.
Otherwise you really need a dedicated computer with a videocard.
You said "Pavillion HP Laptop with an Intel Core i3 7th Gen. " Which exact model? (sticker on bottom)
My 2 cents, I'm rendering with Iray on a 6 GB iMac, so it's always rendering in CPU mode (Mac unfortunately doesn't support NVidia cards anymore which are the only cards usable for Iray). So definitely no, you do NOT need a dedicated video card to use Iray. For me with an i5 dual processor, it's not that fast that's true, but if you have only small scenes, like a figure + clothes + hair + lighting + some background props, it's okay, I'm usually not sitting there pulling my hair out in frantic anticipation ;-). Concerning the setting up of scenes, I only do small ones like I said, but these never ever come close to reaching the RAM's maximum. So if you keep it small-ish, you should be doing quite okay.
You might also want to consider getting the Scene Optimizer: https://www.daz3d.com/scene-optimizer.
Again, Iray does generally okay in CPU mode for me and also for other Mac users. Howie Farkes who developed this amazing landscaping system Ultrascenery (https://www.daz3d.com/ultrascenery--realistic-landscape-system) said he did all his 3D stuff on a Mac in CPU mode as well, with very little RAM too if I remember correctly. So don't get scared off too easily.
Hope that helps some!
If the laptop is using shared memory for CPU and the GPU (likely an Intel chip), then that reduces the amount of memory available to Daz Studio.
No.
You'll manage to do a bit, but basically: No.
IMO 16GB is barely enough.
I have a 16 gig laptop with a 6gb Nvidia graphics card and it's a little on the slow side with any scene that's moderately large. Take that as you will ;) I'm going to upgrade it soon to 32 gigs system ram, which is the max for that laptop.
Laurie
I build all my sets on a 8 gb computer, then test them on a 4 gb and 16gb systems. All are desktops. 3DL renderer works fine on all of them, but once Iray renders are being consider, 16 gigs of ram and a minium 4 gb nvidia video card seems to be base specs to get anything done with the size of texture files and resources. . Another thing to consider is the cooling system for the laptop, cause resource intensive scenes tend to cause laptops to heat especially if they drop to cpu.
So your question, is 6 gb enough ram. For 3Delight renders in dazstudio, yes. For Iray renders, perhaps very simple scenes with some resource management that will be render via cpu and thus, slow.
Very good info. By the time you add a cooling base to a laptop, you are reducing its mobility to the point that you may as well have a desktop. You could use the laptop as a scene builder, then copy the scene to a shared disk (NAS) and render on a desktop. Basically, a 6GB laptop is very limiting. The longer you use it, the more obvious this will become.
It depends on what you want to do with it. Every computer has limitations, it's all about working within them.
I can render figures in enviroments while the system is doing other stuff and not use more than 2GB RAM and 2-3GB Vram (I have loads more, but most of it is assigned elsewhere). I'm sure people can do stuff with much less. It's not like no one rendered anything before the current hardware came along.
1 billion GB of RAM isn't enough if the scene requirements are high enough. But they don't have to be.
It is impossible for a laptop with that CPU to have 6Gb of RAM. Those CPU's require DDR4 and those sticks only come in 4Gb, 8Gb, 16Gb etc.
Maybe it's 8 with 2 shared/video, so Windows reports 6?
You might even have a hard time just booting Daz Studio itself on that thing, let alone actually doing anything on it. I have a laptop with a older i3. It can boot Daz, but doing anything in Daz is not a fun process at all. It is essentially useless. I can't even rotate the camera around the viewport.
A laptop with a i3 is not going to have any kind of Nvidia GPU, and even if it did, it wouldn't matter because whatever they would pair with an i3 would be the absolute bottom of the barrel anyway, thus worthless.
Daz Studio is free. The Genesis Starter Essentials is free. That includes the base model, 1 hair, a pair of undies, and an outfit, and maybe a couple other things. There is always something being given away for free. There is also an environment, but I would not dare try that. You can always download them and try it out for yourself.
But I'll warn you, you probably will not be happy. You will be rendering on a i3 CPU with 2 cores. Most paint will dry faster than you renders. A 5 o'clock shadow will grow faster than your renders.
BTW, there is a benchmark thread in my signature. The scene that is linked in the first post uses only the free content from Genesis 2, 3, 8 Starter Essentials. You can compare rendering times to posts in that thread. If you dare, you can try doing the benchmark yourself. It will help, because then you will know exactly how much faster other hardware can be. So if you do go out looking for a computer, you can have an idea of what might work for you within your budget. However the bench does not factor memory, it is purely a speed test. Both are obviously important.
...I use one on teh assembly system for render tests to check textures of scene subsets to and individual custom characters (with Fast Production Lights for Iray). 4 GB of VRAM is usually sufficient for this purpose, but yeah, not much more .
...yes Intel HD 630 integrated graphics uses shared memory which is considered dynamic. This means it will access whatever memory is currently free will be used (which in W10 is up to half the total system memory which on a 6 GB system would be 3 GB). So if you upgraded the system to 16 GB you would have the potential for up to to 8 GB sharted graphics memory graphics. The HD 630 has a base frequency of 300 MHz and a peak of 1.1 GHx
How dynamic shared memory works is say you are using 5 GB total between Daz, your scene and Windows, you will have 1 GB left over for graphics. The more memory you use for such operations, the less shared memory is available for graphics (I believe the minimum though is 128 MB, yes, megabytes). If you are just browsing the Net, watching a YouTube video etc, you likely would have the full system maximum of 3 GB devoted to graphics.
...yes there are HP Pavilion notebooks with only 6 GB of memory.
https://www.amazon.com/HP-Laptop-Screen-Windows-17-bs051od/dp/B079QBFHKJ
There was recent talk about Asus releasing a RTX 2060 Super mobile GPU for laptops which would cool for laptop rendering. But Asus has since denied there will be any such card.
Obviously the more powerful GPU you have the more heat it will generate that needs to be dealt with.... hard to do with laptops. Personally I'd never render on a laptop.
6GB in consumer laptop is not typical but they are not uncommon. Gen7 still uses DDR3 and it has 2GB models. The original design is probably a two slot machine with one 4GB stick and one empty slot reserved for upgrade. Insted of adding another 4GB stick the OEM probably has some leftover 2GB or was able to source some cheap 2GB sticks so they bump up the spec to clear inventory. It's not ideal as you lose an empty slot and the benefit of dual channel memory but it's not something people buying 6GB laptops worry about.
...when I first got into this over a dozen years ago (back in the Daz 1.8 days), I was working and rendering on a 32 bit Toshiba Satellite with a duo core Celeron CPU and 4 GB of ,memory and a "whopping" 80 GB HDD and just a single duo purpose vent on the side . The heat generated by the CPU burned out the switches for a number of keys at the top of the keyboard. When UE was integrated into ver 3.1 Advanced, it became a certain ticket to a render crash. That was when I decided 64 bit was the only way to go and built my first system.
The old notebook still works, but I have to use an external wireless keyboard.
I think the model is HP Pavilion 17 Flagship, it is also on amazon.
They have to be reporting the nonshared RAM. This is my field there has never been a 1Gb, 2Gb, 3GB or 6Gb stick of DDR4. The spec is very specific.