Iray speed setting - in case your renders are waaaaaay too slow!

Sparkie ShockSparkie Shock Posts: 96
edited April 2015 in Daz Studio Discussion

Okay, I just so happened to stumble upon a comment mentioned in another thread .. gave it a try .. and it's like WOW! .. NOW things work! SO I'm repeating this for the benefit of people like myself who are wondering just what the hell is up with Iray and why it won't play nice!

So here it is:

In the Render Setting - Optimization tab menu .. change from 'memory' to 'speed'. Hit render .. and watch your machine rock!

I have a very VERY expensive 2014 model Mac Pro, with 6 cores of E5 loveliness, 32 gig of ECC ram .. and twin AMD Fire Pro D500 graphics cards both with 3 Gig of Ram on them ... so when I tell you my iRay renders were crawling and eventually grinding to a halt for no reason, you'll understand why I'm fucking pissed! No render engine on the planet would be bringing my beast to it's knees.

So after trying the 'speed' setting I'm happy to say that my computer has regained its dignity and is rendering kick ass iRay scenes .. much MUCH faster. The problem last time was that I got to hour 50 of rendering and found nothing happening at all. The program wasn't locked up .. but it sure wasn't getting anywhere.

I suppose the 'Memory' setting is for use with the NVIDIA graphics cards?? All very well if you have one but if not you're kinda screwed. Well that is unless yo change it to speed and all of a sudden it works. Speed - really should be the default option here. It should be obvious .. but, if you're like me, you thought it best to leave all the settings at default .. lest it blow something up!

Post edited by Sparkie Shock on
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Comments

  • mikael-aronssonmikael-aronsson Posts: 546
    edited December 1969

    Well,the purpose with Iray is to render fast on nVIDIA cards even if it works without one, what do you expect from a product developed by nVIDIA ?

    The speed/memory switch is a tradeof between better performance by using more memory or the other way around, I guess they decided that using less memory was a good default choice.

  • Jan19Jan19 Posts: 1,109

    So, with an AMD card, I'd need to use "speed" then.  My render times are decent, from what I'm reading on various forums, but I wondered if changing to "memory" would speed 'er on up.  Guess not.  Thanks!  :-)

  • nicsttnicstt Posts: 11,714

    You cant use AMD gfx card to render with IRAY; it will use the cpu, intel or AMD.

  • StratDragonStratDragon Posts: 3,167
    edited August 2015

    The majority of CUDA enabled Nvidia cards are the only hardware that will take advantage of any speed gains from the Iray engine, otherwise if you have any Intel or internal shared video card or AMD/ATI video card (s) you only option is the CPU, additionally some older Nvidia cards that are CUDA enabled may not work or be unstable despite still having drive software that is up-to-date.

    You can not take advantage of Nvidia cards SLI but you can use multiple cards in the same rig, however you cant share video RAM between two or more CUDA cards so if one card has 2GB VRAM and one card has 4GB VRAM and your scene begins to render with both cards, then requires more than 2GB VRAM your 2GB VRAM card will stop assisting the render and hand off all calculations to the 4GB card exclusivly. If your scene tops over 4GB your next card will stop assisting and Iray will continue on using CPU and System RAM at the expense of speed offered by CUDA. If your rig has four (4) identical Nvidia cards with 4GB VRAM cards and 1024 CUDA cores each your computing power is 4GB VRAM and 4096 CUDA cores.
    On a system with mulitple Nvida Cuda cards: Your cores will multiply but your VRAM will not, you can't combine the VRAM across those cards.

    Possibly the FAQ for Iray here on this forums could clarify on what does and what doesn't work in the future.

    Post edited by StratDragon on
  • ToborTobor Posts: 2,300

    I wonder how this settings gets on Memory? The Speed setting is the default. Assuming folks aren't changing it manually and then forgetting about it, are there presets somewhere, or something that come with D|S, that sets this to Memory?

  • AndySAndyS Posts: 1,434

    Hi,

    In the Render Setting - Optimization tab menu .. change from 'memory' to 'speed'. Hit render .. and watch your machine rock!

    you're funny!

    My render setting is "speed". And it is slow as hell.

    This little attached indoor scene (400 x 340) needed 4 hours to render. (Win7 64 pro, i5 quad core).

    Other scenes in the same setting succeeded to 18% after 20 hours for 1200 x 800 pix.

    OK - outdoor scenes with full sun light only need 45 mins.

    But together with all the other bugs I already reported iray is a real NOGO !!

    Bungalow Mirror Scene.jpg
    400 x 340 - 104K
  • ToborTobor Posts: 2,300

    Renders with light streaming through a window or doorway will render a little faster and better if you turn on the Architectural Sampler filter in the Optimization group, The filter is engineered as a helper for scenes like this.

    That said, outdoor scenes that take 45 minutes seems excessive. 

  • edited March 2016

    Here's what worked for me to speed rendering for movies (short clips of a minute or less):

    Choose or set:
    Under Render Settings:
    (1) set render engine to: Basic OpenGL (the render warns you not to obscure the "viewport" when you choose Basic OpenGL to use for rendering)

    (2) set render type to: movie

    After movie renders, , you will be prompted on whether to compress the file.  I have played around with the different choices, and the "Intel" compression option on my system worked.  You can also choose no compression, but the resulting avi will be a comparatively large file size.

    I'm working on a laptop with nothing near cutting edge specs: 8 gigs ram, 673 gb  non SSD hard drive, and intel i7-2670 QM CPU 2.20 ghz.  As a test, I did a render of a one-minute clip (a single character, based on Victoria 5, walking around and dancing in the "contemporary studio apartment").  It rendered in under an hour.

     

     

     

    Post edited by seedega_a3cdb8f04c on
  • hphoenixhphoenix Posts: 1,335

    A lot of the speed complaints about Iray (both on-GPU and on-CPU) stem from not having correct lighting and render settings.  If it's taking a long time, even in a simple scene, chances are that you don't have enough light, and the camera is overexposed to compensate.  But that doesn't really fix the issue.  Adjust your film speed, F-stop, and shutter speed to correct values for what you are doing, and then adjust the lighting to be correct.  For brighter-lit, outdoor or high-intensity lighting indoors, you need a higher F-Stop (which makes the aperture smaller, reducing the incoming light to the camera) or a faster shutter speed, or a less sensitive film (higher ISO).  For lower-lit scenes, you need to do the opposite.  Exactly which parameters get changed depends on the scene.

    If you are having issues with speed in Iray, chances are it is a lighting issue.  If the image is coming up grainy as heck at first, and doesn't seem to clear up at all, you don't have enough light getting to the film.  Even if it looks bright enough (that means you've probably got a high ISO film, and wrong fStop and shutter speed for it and the scene....which you've got overexposed on the film.)

    Image Google "Film ISO chart uses" and look at the various charts that show you all about how to go about it.  Or Google "basic camera settings fstop iso shutter" and you'll find plenty of reading to get you started.

     

    Iray simulates a REAL camera (or very close.)  If you pick up a manual film camera and just start shooting pictures, you'll get lousy photos.  Same with Iray.  Iray will TRY despite the settings to deliver an image....just like the camera.  But unlike the camera, it has to calculate everything, and when the settings are bad, it keeps trying to get the image to get better, and can't.  So it goes very slowly.


    If after adjusting the render settings to what should be 'correct' values, and adjusting the lighting appropriately, things are STILL incredibly slow, start hiding parts of the scene one at a time and re-rendering.  When things suddenly speed up, you'll know the hidden one is what is causing all the issues.  If it's a more complex scene, you'll want to hide everything, then unhide things one at a time until you get the big slowdown.  Once you know WHAT is slowing it down, you can look at the model and materials to see what might be causing the issue for Iray.

     

  • Silver DolphinSilver Dolphin Posts: 1,586

    Ok, I have a i7 3930K Intel with 6cores and 64gigs of ram and the only thing that will speed up my renders in Iray is more Nvidia graphics cards. I started out with a Nvidia 640gt with 2gb of vram and 384 cuda cores and this was tooooo slow. So I slowly did my homework and found the best deal was a refurb Nvidia 780 6gb on sale at Newegg for $350 USD. I went from 384 to 2304 cuda cores but my 640 graphics card was running my 2 monitors and doing Iray as well and this slowed down my renders so I plucked down my credit card and got a second refurbished 780 6gb and turn off my 2gb 640 off in the render setting. Wow, what a change. I liked how fast things were that saved up some money and bought the last card on Ebay for a litttle over $350 dollars. Renders now happen under 2 mins in my Windows 7 Pro system. One caveat is that these cards were designed for game use so they do not cool very well under continuous load and they required that I buy a 1000 watt power supply which I had never done before. I had to place 2 heavy duty fans over thes 3 cuda Heat Monsters to keep them from burning up! I also took the sides off my Cooler Master HAF XB to increase air flow. Now the cards keep cool, the last thing I did to speed up renders is use an HDRI file with Infine dome setting to do my lights. My renders now happen under 1 minute.  Or, if you don't want to spend money just use Opengl it makes instant renders.

  • towdow3towdow3 Posts: 83

    i have an 8 core 2008 mac pro with a gtx 670 2gb version. I find that when i have buzzed hair genesis 3 on even turning the camera makes it lag, and sometimes rendering a scene takes hours. what can i do to speed that up?

  • JerifeJerife Posts: 272
    hphoenix said:

    A lot of the speed complaints about Iray (both on-GPU and on-CPU) stem from not having correct lighting and render settings.  If it's taking a long time, even in a simple scene, chances are that you don't have enough light, and the camera is overexposed to compensate.  But that doesn't really fix the issue.  Adjust your film speed, F-stop, and shutter speed to correct values for what you are doing, and then adjust the lighting to be correct.  For brighter-lit, outdoor or high-intensity lighting indoors, you need a higher F-Stop (which makes the aperture smaller, reducing the incoming light to the camera) or a faster shutter speed, or a less sensitive film (higher ISO).  For lower-lit scenes, you need to do the opposite.  Exactly which parameters get changed depends on the scene.

    If you are having issues with speed in Iray, chances are it is a lighting issue.  If the image is coming up grainy as heck at first, and doesn't seem to clear up at all, you don't have enough light getting to the film.  Even if it looks bright enough (that means you've probably got a high ISO film, and wrong fStop and shutter speed for it and the scene....which you've got overexposed on the film.)

    Image Google "Film ISO chart uses" and look at the various charts that show you all about how to go about it.  Or Google "basic camera settings fstop iso shutter" and you'll find plenty of reading to get you started.

     

    Iray simulates a REAL camera (or very close.)  If you pick up a manual film camera and just start shooting pictures, you'll get lousy photos.  Same with Iray.  Iray will TRY despite the settings to deliver an image....just like the camera.  But unlike the camera, it has to calculate everything, and when the settings are bad, it keeps trying to get the image to get better, and can't.  So it goes very slowly.


    If after adjusting the render settings to what should be 'correct' values, and adjusting the lighting appropriately, things are STILL incredibly slow, start hiding parts of the scene one at a time and re-rendering.  When things suddenly speed up, you'll know the hidden one is what is causing all the issues.  If it's a more complex scene, you'll want to hide everything, then unhide things one at a time until you get the big slowdown.  Once you know WHAT is slowing it down, you can look at the model and materials to see what might be causing the issue for Iray.

     

    Excellent explanation. Thanks

  • JerifeJerife Posts: 272
    Tobor said:

    Renders with light streaming through a window or doorway will render a little faster and better if you turn on the Architectural Sampler filter in the Optimization group, The filter is engineered as a helper for scenes like this.

    That said, outdoor scenes that take 45 minutes seems excessive. 

    Thanks for the tip

  • I'm seeing this too, but it seems it's only in images I'm trying to do "mood lighting" in.  So what I'm doing now is just making it brighter, and darkening it in photoshop.  Just thinking outloud, but I think what might be slowing it is shadow calculations. I could be wrong, but I am seeing that brighter lights make it render faster and without "fireflies".

  • MattymanxMattymanx Posts: 6,878

    Iray likes more light.  More light makes it render faster

  • wolf359wolf359 Posts: 3,749
    Mattymanx said:

    Iray likes more light.  More light makes it render faster

    Correct!
    This is true with all PBR render engines.
    From Blender Cycles to Nextlimit s Maxwell.

  • I have hit a huge snag here. I have a Quandro P5000, supposedly the 2nd best card they make wioth lots of cores and 16gb memory. I got the latest version of DAZ 4.9 which they just put out which will put a load on the card. My problem is my Iray renders are slower than my old card, like 11.5 hoours to do high quality render. My setting is on speed, I tried to render a saved scene I had did in the past on my older card. I used the GPU only setting, wow in just over 4 minutes it was 17% complete however 45 minutes later it was still only 17% complete. It currently 70% complete at the 3 hour 23 minute mark. Apparently DAZ stutters with my brand new card. DAZ has already informed me in a nice way to go away, as they have no plans to buy an expensive video card like mine to test. If anyone has any idea please let me know...thank-you

    PS I envey the 1 minute render guy

  • AndySAndyS Posts: 1,434
    Mattymanx said:

    Iray likes more light.  More light makes it render faster

    so far a nice hint. But simply increasing the intensity of the lightsources in your scene (and adapting the tone mapping settings of cause) doesn't help, cause what slows down render times is the amount of indirectly lighted areas (shadows).
    Adding some additional lights to give more light into the shadow areas is NOT photoreal and not a valid solution for serious scenes.
    For fantasy scenes you may do what ever you want.

  • AndyS said:
    Mattymanx said:

    Iray likes more light.  More light makes it render faster

    so far a nice hint. But simply increasing the intensity of the lightsources in your scene (and adapting the tone mapping settings of cause) doesn't help, cause what slows down render times is the amount of indirectly lighted areas (shadows).
    Adding some additional lights to give more light into the shadow areas is NOT photoreal and not a valid solution for serious scenes.
    For fantasy scenes you may do what ever you want.

    It's what photographers do, with reflectors and softboxes. If you look at photos of a photoshoot there are often as many lighting stands as on a film set.

  • ToborTobor Posts: 2,300

    The intent of the original post is useful, but it's important to keep in mind the speed/memory setting dictates how Iray sets up its own instancing of geometry in the scene. Benefits from it depends on your scene.

    You can read about it here:

    http://www.migenius.com/doc/realityserver/latest/resources/general/iray/manual/index.html#/concept/instancing.html

    D|S calls the "on" setting Memory, and the "off" setting Speed. You'd pick Memory if the scene is too big to fit in your card, and are willing to sacrifice the speed. Whether this setting makes a big difference or not depends on the geometry in your scene. Keep in mind that this feature is not supported in Interactive mode, only Photoreal. 

    For the Quandro P5000, check your driver, and examine the troubleshooting log, which will tell you if the card is even involved in rendering.

  • SpottedKittySpottedKitty Posts: 7,232
    HadCancer said:

    I have a Quandro P5000, supposedly the 2nd best card they make wioth lots of cores and 16gb memory. I got the latest version of DAZ 4.9 which they just put out which will put a load on the card.

    One other thing to check —  did you also update your graphics card drivers? The version of Iray in the shiny new release of D|S must have a recent version of the NVidia drivers (I think it's 372 or later).

  • HadCancer said:

    I have hit a huge snag here. I have a Quandro P5000, supposedly the 2nd best card they make wioth lots of cores and 16gb memory. I got the latest version of DAZ 4.9 which they just put out which will put a load on the card. My problem is my Iray renders are slower than my old card, like 11.5 hoours to do high quality render. My setting is on speed, I tried to render a saved scene I had did in the past on my older card. I used the GPU only setting, wow in just over 4 minutes it was 17% complete however 45 minutes later it was still only 17% complete. It currently 70% complete at the 3 hour 23 minute mark. Apparently DAZ stutters with my brand new card. DAZ has already informed me in a nice way to go away, as they have no plans to buy an expensive video card like mine to test. If anyone has any idea please let me know...thank-you

    PS I envey the 1 minute render guy

    Also, be sure to test your card with cpu rendering off.  I found that there is some sort of back and forth with the cpu while rendering that turns the card on and off and actually makes it slower sometimes than rendering with just the GPU.

  • 3D-GHDesign3D-GHDesign Posts: 669
    edited January 2017

    I have 2 NVIDIA GTX 980Ti cards with 6GB memory. And since last DS update my renders are slower. The pre-processing part is really slow. It is not problem for the large renders, but when I make many small one, it is really bad :( And today I rendered a small picture with 3 Genesis 3 Female in the very simple scene. (a floor, chair, curtain and their clothes) and I noticed .. Iray use CPU!!!

    Iray VERBOSE - module:category(IRAY:RENDER): 1.8 IRAY rend progr: CUDA device 1 (GeForce GTX 980 Ti): Processing scene...

    Iray VERBOSE - module:category(IRAY:RENDER): 1.4 IRAY rend stat : Geometry memory consumption: 240.04 MiB (device 0), 0 B (host)

    Iray VERBOSE - module:category(IRAY:RENDER): 1.3 IRAY rend stat : Geometry memory consumption: 240.04 MiB (device 1), 0 B (host)

    Iray VERBOSE - module:category(IRAY:RENDER): 1.2 IRAY rend progr: CPU: Processing scene...

     

    I don't understand, it should be good for my cards. Never happened before :(

    Tried to change optimization to speed .. didn't help :(

     

    EDIT:

     

    Damn!!!! I used Iray render in viewport as preview when I started the rendering ... and that was 10 minutes. And now I noticed this, changed to texture shaded, started the render and finally my cards made the magic and the render time was 48 sec! :D

    Post edited by 3D-GHDesign on
  • ToborTobor Posts: 2,300

    Might be a bug in the scene database collection, or something. Be sure to report this to customer support.

     

  • FossilFossil Posts: 166

    It's what photographers do, with reflectors and softboxes. If you look at photos of a photoshoot there are often as many lighting stands as on a film set.

    I've gotta reinforce Richard's comment.  I was a professional photographer (with some graphic arts thrown in) for 41 years and have many scars from tripping over the zillions of cables on the studio floor.  We had several setups, some of which had taken days of experimentation to get perfect, for various jobs, and had tape all over the floor to mark the positions for lights and reflectors.  There was the studio book where we wrote down light settings and had sketches of each setup. 

  • So, question...if I started a render in memory mode then pause and switch to speed mode... will it then render the rest in said speed mode or do I have to start the render over?

  • So, question...if I started a render in memory mode then pause and switch to speed mode... will it then render the rest in said speed mode or do I have to start the render over?

    I haven't tried but, given that you are chnaging the data uploaded to Iray, I would strongly expect it to trigger a restart.

  • AndySAndyS Posts: 1,434
    edited January 2017

    Hi Richard,

    AndyS said:
    Mattymanx said:

    Iray likes more light.  More light makes it render faster

    so far a nice hint. But simply increasing the intensity of the lightsources in your scene (and adapting the tone mapping settings of cause) doesn't help, cause what slows down render times is the amount of indirectly lighted areas (shadows).
    Adding some additional lights to give more light into the shadow areas is NOT photoreal and not a valid solution for serious scenes.
    For fantasy scenes you may do what ever you want.

    It's what photographers do, with reflectors and softboxes. If you look at photos of a photoshoot there are often as many lighting stands as on a film set.

    that's right.
    But I'm talking about real scenes. For outdoor scenes there is the sun the only light source. For indoor the lamps of the set (built in by the creator) are the only available light sources.
    That moment you add further light sources without any physically corresponding object, it isn't a real setup anymore. It is a fantasy scene or a photostudio setup.
    And as I previously stated: In that case you can do what ever you want - but it is NOT photorealistic - the quality claimed by nVidia.

    Post edited by AndyS on
  • AndyS said:

    Hi Richard,

    AndyS said:
    Mattymanx said:

    Iray likes more light.  More light makes it render faster

    so far a nice hint. But simply increasing the intensity of the lightsources in your scene (and adapting the tone mapping settings of cause) doesn't help, cause what slows down render times is the amount of indirectly lighted areas (shadows).
    Adding some additional lights to give more light into the shadow areas is NOT photoreal and not a valid solution for serious scenes.
    For fantasy scenes you may do what ever you want.

    It's what photographers do, with reflectors and softboxes. If you look at photos of a photoshoot there are often as many lighting stands as on a film set.

    that's right.
    But I'm talking about real scenes. For outdoor scenes there is the sun the only light source. For indoor the lamps of the set (built in by the creator) are the only available light sources.
    That moment you add further light sources without any physically corresponding object, it isn't a real setup anymore. It is a fantasy scene or a photostudio setup.
    And as I previously stated: In that case you can do what ever you want - but it is NOT photorealistic - the quality claimed by nVidia.

    What do you want? Iray can - given enough time/samples and a realistically filled environment - produce an accurate(ish) representation of a badly lit photo if that is your goal. It can also produce a photorealistic(ish) image of a scene lit by modelled reflectors and soft-boxes. Or you can cheat by having emissive surfaces. None of this conflicts with the claim of photorealism (though that is no doubt a marketing term, not a precise description of the engine's capabilities).

  • AndySAndyS Posts: 1,434

    Sorry Richard,

    What do you want? Iray can - given enough time/samples and a realistically filled environment - produce an accurate(ish) representation of a badly lit photo if that is your goal.

    you still didn't get it.

    If you claim to render photorealistic, you have to compare it with the real situation in open nature or your sun-lit livingroom.
    On photographs the contrast of light and shadow is very strong. Way too strong for our brain. So our little computer in our head compensates it. Say: if the area lighted by the sun is photographed with 100ASA, our brain compensates the shadow as if it was photographed at the same time with 1000ASA.

    But if you do that in your renders by applying additional light sources without any real physical device, you're no longer photorealistic. As a workaround you may compensate it with gamma-correction.

    As I already told you:
    If you're in your photostudio or any fantasy scene, you can add additional lights as much and what kind ever as you want.
    But for real scenes there're only the native lights allowed to stay photorealistic.

    That's the scale to compare with !
    For most of the situations that means to be patient enough to render over 99.x% of convergement. And try to avoid too much shadowed areas? The good balance of light and shadow is that special of best pictures.

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