Still having Iray issues...

Comments

• BeeMKay Posts: 7,019

  June 2015 edited June 2015

  About the crash report, just make it a bug report. Best way to get it answered and fixed. :-)
  I've done a couple of them myself.

  Actually, G3F comes with 3Delight materials. In the G3F folder, check the "materials", it's down there...

  As for the renders, do not use any 3Delight lights in the scene.
  Here's a possible setup for a test:
  Turn off the Headlamp in case you are using a camera.
  Environment tab
  Dome Only. Use the default HDRI image.
  If you want to se a background, turn Draw Dome" to "on".
  Sun/Sky only:
  No other lights.
  Set the sun to around 11 am.
  About the background, turn on "Draw Dome".
  Any setting with "scene" uses scene lights, so if you load a distant light, mesh light, etc.
  If you use scene light sonly ,make certain they are set high enough (around 45.000 units in lumiance (don't use the upper part of the sliders, they are for 3Delight)), unless you want to fiddle with Tonemapping settings.

  Post edited by BeeMKay on June 2015
• bytescapes Posts: 1,905

  June 2015 edited December 1969

  I have a slightly newer MacBook Pro, which has the GT 750M in place of your GT 650M. I haven't experienced any of the crashes that you reported. I've also found that the Iray render speeds are generally "acceptable".

  What you consider 'acceptable' is very much a matter of personal taste. I've been using Lux quite a lot, so I'm accustomed to multi-hour renders. Iray on my machine is slower than 3Delight in most cases, but noticeably faster than Lux (which, like Iray, is an unbiased renderer).

  Your timings, considering the size of your sample image and its relative simplicity, look pretty much in line with what I'm seeing.

  I don't know if you should expect Iray to be a fast renderer unless you have, as you say, a top-end desktop box. I think the promise is that its renders are "better" than 3Delight.

  I found a page about Nvidia GPUs which lists the different cards they make and also includes a measure of their 'compute capability'. Interestingly, the number for your GT 650M and my GT 750M is the same, at 3.0, but even their high-end desktop cards seem to top out at around 5.2. So if those numbers relate directly to Iray performance (big 'if'), then a high-end desktop might be a little less than twice as fast as our laptops.

  In summary, I think your Iray performance is probably within the expected range (based on a very limited sample, i.e. my machine). Those crashes sound worrying, though. That's definitely not right.
• mjc1016 Posts: 15,001

  June 2015 edited December 1969

  angusm said:

  In summary, I think your Iray performance is probably within the expected range (based on a very limited sample, i.e. my machine). Those crashes sound worrying, though. That's definitely not right.

  They sound heat related to me...
• bytescapes Posts: 1,905

  June 2015 edited June 2015

  mjc1016 said:

  angusm said:

  In summary, I think your Iray performance is probably within the expected range (based on a very limited sample, i.e. my machine). Those crashes sound worrying, though. That's definitely not right.

  They sound heat related to me...

  MacBook Pros typically have two graphics systems: a basic Intel graphics subsystem embedded in the CPU, and a separate GPU such as an NVidia GeForce or an AMD Radeon ('discrete graphics'). The OS will switch automatically between the two according to need: the embedded Intel uses less power, but the discrete chip can be invoked by applications that need high-end processing power, such as Photoshop ... or DAZ Studio.

  Some lines of MacBook Pros have had defects in the way that the discrete graphics chip was physically connected to the motherboard. And yes, it seems that heat exacerbated these defects (as you might expect: expansion of metal parts could mean that a loose connection suddenly became much looser). If an already hot system auto-switched from embedded to discrete -- or became hot in the course of a render -- and the OS went looking for the discrete GPU only to find that the GPU wasn't responding, then you would get anything from an application-level crash to a full-on kernel panic.

  Apple has acknowledged the issue in the case of the 2010 and 2011 lines (Apple recently replaced the motherboard in my 2011 MBP for free because of this issue). However, from the fact that @lee_lhs has an Nvidia card, it sounds as if that's a more recent machine, and I'm not aware of any acknowledged problems with the newer models. It might be worth looking at the Apple support forums to see if other users are complaining of similar problems: if they are, Apple may eventually offer a free fix.

  Post edited by bytescapes on June 2015
• mjc1016 Posts: 15,001

  June 2015 edited December 1969

  Same issue that plagued Lenovo/IBM Thinkpads, with Nvidia graphics cards...and the same fix. Reflow the solder on the motherboard or replace it.
• DrNewcenstein Posts: 816

  June 2015 edited December 1969

  My Win8 64 ASUS laptop has the GT 750M and for a similar scene (single figure, one clothing item, hair, default HDRI backdrop and Draw Dome on), I'm getting GPU-only speeds of 8 minutes for 480 iterations. CPU (i7-4700HQ) time is 12 minutes for 480 iterations.
  Using the CPU+GPU, I get 464 iterations in 5m 30s.

  So your 4+ minutes ain't all that bad.

  My desktop with 2 GTX 780 Ti is doing the same scene in 272 iterations and about 20 seconds, but using only one card I get 257 iterations in 39 seconds on one, and 325 iterations in 49 seconds using just the 2nd card. Haven't figured out yet which one in the list is handling the display, though. I'd assume the one with the longer time.

  Using CPU+Both GPUs, it did 336 iterations in 33 seconds.

  I did find that SLI does not help render speeds at all. Same scene, 345 iterations took 14 minutes 56 seconds using both cards set for SLI. Adding the CPU into that mix did not speed things up much (a few seconds).

  
  However, I'm unable to render anything on my dual Xeon Win7 system for some reason. It was working fine the other day, but all I get is a black image, even using the exact same scene and settings as on my other machines. The card in that one is a K4000. I've added a point light set to 70 million Lumens right in front of the character, but I get nothing.
  Was there an update that killed Win7x64 support?
• DrNewcenstein Posts: 816

  June 2015 edited December 1969

  Fixed the issue with the K4000 not rendering - had to roll back to an older video driver.
• mjc1016 Posts: 15,001

  June 2015 edited December 1969

  Newc said:

  Fixed the issue with the K4000 not rendering - had to roll back to an older video driver.

  Some things never change...

  Nvidia driver roulette is one of them, it seems.
• oomu Posts: 175

  June 2015 edited December 1969

  MacSavers said:

  Still, even with the crash, Iray isn't doing what I expected. The GPU only was the fastest, although only by three (3) seconds. The CPU and GPU together was actually the longest render time. This is nuts. For a renderer that's supposed to use the nVidia graphics chip to help speed the renders, this was hugely disappointing and confirms my original opinion that Iray is designed for high end computers only. Not laptops certainly. So my hobby just became a bit more complicated if Daz decides to drop 3Delight from the rendering options in the next version. I'm crossing my fingers that won't happen.

  Apple user here talking :)

  
  There is no reason why DAZ would give up on 3Dlight. Way too soon.

  Iray is really accelerated on GPU and it shows, but a laptop will never be a good machine for that. A laptop is constrained by heat. The discret GPU is good for quick video/3D calculation, in burst, like in a video game.

  but sustained calculations will force the laptop to slowdown the gpu and cpu: in short a laptop is not a device adapted to long rendering.

  -
  A macbook pro is a complex device with two chips for CG., the integrated and discret ones. It may be possible when DAZ monopolize the discret gpu, the os x kernel can be sometimes in front of an unanswering gpu and a deactivated integrated gpu, and have no other course than doing a crash.

  I guess nvidia drivers are very important and bugs are plenty.

  Too much heat could also force the nvidia chipset to abort cores.

  -
  I also not convinced it's safe for a laptop to be used for sustained calculation days after days, months after months.

  -
  I advise a desktop PC, with _good_ heat dispersion and ventilation. good alimentation, good air flow, it's very important, and then put one or two good nvidia GTX (with two gpu don't forget to check the alimentation and the motherboard/cpu support enough of pcie bandwith). It will be the device to make rendering.

  
  --
  For a mac users, I would have advised a Mac Pro, one of before 2013, because they were very reliable, well engineered and not too much noisy. I still use one with a custom PC gtx nvidia 680 under Os X Yosemite (and I'm thinking about a Titan X... it works with a 2009 mac pro).

  The "new" mac pro (end 2013) is not good for iray. The new mac pro is only dual-amd radeon. It can be interesting for LuxRender, thanks to the two GPU and lot of VRAM, it's a very elegant device, not taking too much place or making a ruckus even under heavy stress (very very good heat dispersion), with great SSD and efficient intel XEON cpu. That computer took a full year of 3DLight/Lux calculations without worries.

  
  But well.. we are talking about iray, and for now Apple has no products adapted to that. It's a real concern because of Cuda being entrenched in 3D world.
• MacSavers Posts: 324

  June 2015 edited December 1969

  lee_lhs said:

  Actually, G3F comes with 3Delight materials. In the G3F folder, check the "materials", it's down there...

  Yes, I know about the G3F does, but I was speaking about Victoria 7 specifically. V7 does not have any 3Delight skins as a default. You'd have to apply one.

  As for other suggestions, I'll give that a try and see if I get any extra speed out of it. I'm certainly hoping...

  As for the instability, I've run a ton of 3D programs and games. Some cause the fans to go nuts for very long periods, without any issues. The game might crash, although very few do nowadays, but never crash the entire OS. Only Iray with GPU selected to do the render does that happen. The fans rarely come on when doing it and I have an app that watches the temperature. I had to do that for beta testing a game for a developer, so I've kept it just to test out situations like this. Something else is causing the instability, not heat.
• mjc1016 Posts: 15,001

  June 2015 edited December 1969

  A different driver version, maybe?

  I know the Mac drivers are not the same as the rest of them...different schedule and such.
• nemesis10 Posts: 3,788

  June 2015 edited December 1969

  One thing that might help is to have the current nvidia driver: http://www.nvidia.com/object/mac-driver-archive.html Notice that the latest just came out... double check in System Profiler what card you have and what driver you have.