Had to upgrade! Iray maps use some memory!
jas_va_26
Posts: 74
I just had to laugh last night and make the order so I could upgrade.
So in the rev up sale, I bought well... A lot. To much! Then decided to go start playing with all the new items. Loaded up 3 figures into the Prison Shower scene, and kicked off a test render with the lighting I tossed in... WHY IS MY PC RUNNING SO SLOW RIGHT NOW???? Nope didn't check the CPU in the render process, 3D card is working its little heart out. (GTX970) ....Task Manager? Can you tell me?
How about your using all 12 gig of ram, and have a massive page file (swap) going right now!!!!! So total memory consumption on the system was about 18 Gig!
Moral of this story? $200 later, and $37 Next day shipping, I have 24 Gig of ram on the way, and that will pretty much max out this PC. Time to start looking at full upgrades. Most likely Alienware.
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Comments
Glad it worked out for you.
But before you buy an alienware I would consider looking at other software that could render the same scene without spending so much on the computer...Everytime people spend crazy monies to use Daz Iray(without even thinking about alternatives) I cringe and die a bit inside.
Larsmidnatt,
I'm curious, this system is actually getting up there in years. I replaced the video card with a GTX970, and the CPU is first generation i7. In looking at the upgrade speed would be the biggest factor. (not only for DAZ, but for other GPU intensive work as well for my day job.) I'm curious about what software your suggesting though.
I built my current computer for ~$1000 , an equivalent Alienware would be around $2200 (according to Dell's "Build you own" )
If you don't mind putting them together yourself, you can save a ton of cash.
Which ever path you take, get as much RAM and as many CPU cores as you can.
Are you running any other software when Studio is running? Is your system doing a virus scan? Are you rendering with your GPU in Iray if so 24GB RAM is not going to help unless you use the CPU for the Iray render?
I use 3 figures with clothing and hi-poly props I make in Blender and 12GB RAM and an ancient GTS250 with 1GB DDR3 it's not bad at all with a 27" LCD as my full viewport (1200x1900) and my 25" LCD (1900x1080) as the pallets, I generally have Blender running and unless I have some truly massive scene I might even have LuxRender turned down to 4 cores on my i7 920 (it's 6 years old), my box is not crawling.
If the CPU is not rendering, and your GPU is, then all the memory Iray needs is fitting inside the 4GB of your graphics card. Your huge page swap file issue is coming from something else. Running an Iray task may be contributing to whatever the issue is, but clearly something else is going on.
So is there another error here? I'm pretty sure it isn't going to load all those maps into 4GB on the card.
THIS! ^
Ailenware is an over-priced dell...No, just no...You're better off with building your own or getting a barebone config at Cyberpower or the like, that way you can at least know what hardware you're putting in your rig, and upgrade accordingly, either via newegg/amazon..Just don't get a mac, or you'll be stuck with a $10,000 rig that you can only upgrade with overpriced mac parts..
Also you can set the affinity for your multi-core CPU to half...(3 if you have a 6 core..)
As others have said you would be better off getting a new gpu for Iray.
As for your first generation I7, you would not see much difference in performance with an upgrade unless you go with the new chipset for the skylake family of CPU and ddr4 memory. Those would give you a noticeable performance upgrade and use less power plus run cooler.
First generation I7 CPUs are still faster than the best AMD processors to date.
I just installed my new 970 GTX and gave it a little test run. A scene with 3700+ iterations that was taking me around an hour and a half on my old card just took less than 20 mins to render in Iray. I think this new card is going to rekindle my love for 3D! The performance boost (660 to 970) is just amazing.
Since I use GPU's for non-graphics work as well, if I were to go buy a new system right now it will have 3x GTX980Ti's in it. I don't have the $5000+ right now to build the system. I have priced it from Alienware for about 6k, I have tried a few others at about $5500 for the specs it will require.
I'm glad this discussion came up again, I'm also considering an upgrade and am in a similar position of having a decent but outdated system.
Here's what I currently have:
CPU: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115225
Motherboard: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813188039
Graphics card: http://www.geforce.com/hardware/desktop-gpus/geforce-gtx-760/specifications
If I were to buy a new machine, I'd probably get a new i7-5820K 6-core 3.30Ghz, but that would also require a new motherboard and RAM. A comparison page I found showed it would probably give a 20% increase in speed over my current CPU, which I don't think is worth the cost right now.
If I bought an nVidia GeForce GTX 980 Ti 6 GB though, that would appear to be a significant improvement over my current card. It has more than twice the CUDA cores and three times as much RAM.
I have 12 GB of RAM (but only 8 seem to be available, never been able to find out why), but I've never run into memory problems. Updating my graphics card seems to be the most logical choice, as that should give a notable improvement to Iray rendering and gaming, and can be put in a new machine when the time comes for a complete upgrade. Your thoughts are appreciated. :)
Running Windows 7 32 bit edition? Or something else 32 bit edition? 8Gb, is the max for those versions. You need the 64 bit version for something higher.
Nah, 64-bit versions. Windows actually sees the 12 gig but only says 8 is usable. One of the main reasons I upgraded to Windows 10 was for the ability to get more RAM. Now I'm ready to downgrade and buy the premium Windows 7 upgrade for that feature. I hate Windows 10.
What RAM did you recently buy?
4GB is the max for 32 bit OSes, surely?
Samsung something or other that meets the specs for my dell XPS 435T, mainly just going from 12 to 24 gig.
SnowSultan this might help you:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa366778(v=vs.85).aspx#physical_memory_limits_windows_7
Agreed, even though I've always been an AMD man...The only reason I never went the Intel route is due to price.
No, please don't do dell...Seriously, you're just throwing money away!
Wha..? In order to get more RAM on your system you need a 64 bit MoBo/CPU not simply a 64 bit OS...You first buy the CPU, THEN the OS that will run on it...As win XP/7/8/10 ALL feature 64 bit versions..Plus, your GPU requires a PCIE 3.0 while your MOBO only supports PCIE 2.0...Seriously, you should go here before you consider paying for any parts as you need to do some serious research before committing to any purchases!
Also, with 12 gb RAM your system usually use only 2-2.5 gb of sys mem out of 12, and yours is using 4!
Yes I know the RAM limits for the various Windows versions, that's why I mentioned wanting to get Windows 10 so I could upgrade in the future. I did write that in my previous post.
"Plus, your GPU requires a PCIE 3.0 while your MOBO only supports PCIE 2.0..."
Which GPU are you talking about, the GTX 760 or the GTX 980 Ti which I don't have yet? Not that it matters apparently: http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-2461806/nvidia-gtx-980-titan-work-fine-pcie.html
And for heaven's sake, I'm running 64-bit versions of Photoshop, Studio, and about fifty other programs; you think I don't know whether I have a 32 or 64-bit system or not?
I am getting really tired of being treated like a noob in every post I make here.
Not necessarily, The memory the scene needs is not the same as the amount needed by the GPU. The scene will also have loaded lots of morph and other data that will not have been transferred to the GPU memory. Depending on the number of morphs you have for your Genesis figure, they often eat up the giants share of the memory needed to load and manipulate a figure.
I also have a GTX 970, and also typically render on GPU only, and the scene memory usage is sometimes huge (I have 32GB in my box), but it still renders happily in my 4GB of GPU memory.
I took SS as saying that 4GB is not available to the system, not that the it was available but in use. On a 64 bit system the RAM address issue that masks the upper GB or so should not happen at all.
Richard: Thank you, that is correct. 12 GB is installed, Speccy and the BIOS both recognize 12 GB, Windows shows 12 installed but says 7.99 is available. I've talked to a number of computer technicians and their only suggestions were to update the BIOS (which I did, no effect) or that there was a problem with one of the RAM sticks or the mobo slots (I tried each stick in each slot, all seem to work fine and are recognized). I just chalk it up to how Windows is displaying it, it probably is able to use all 12 in some way or another.
If I were to have a budget of $5k or more to spend on a 3D art computer, I wouldn't buy a gaming PC like Dell's alienware.Those are mostly eyecandy for the gamer to look at while pwnin n00bs. :)
I would spend that $5k on a nice workstation that had 512GB RAM and a 16 core CPU instead.Drop a Titan in it and it should be good to go for a long time.I've seen some refurbs on sale that had 32 core CPUs and 512GB for $4k.
I assume that 7.99 available is reported from the task manager. Windows will eat about 2GB by itself.The other 2 GB is going to other stuff thats running.Killing off some of that stuff wold get it back for you.Have look through the task manager and see if there is anything running that you don't really use.
As I said, the higher memory use is not coming from the Iray render itself, or else the GPU would not be able to process it. I understand there may be other memory use going on, but as I intimated, the problem is likely elsewhere -- ahem, as in Daz Studio, or possibly a configuration in Windows.
On edit: this kind of memory use seems excessive, and that was my point. To find out where some of it is going I did a little test; see below. With these numbers, I think we're departing from the realm of the average user being able to participate in the creation of quality 3D. Maybe Daz could make some architectural changes in how D|S uses its memory, so that page swapping (cumbersome and slow) can be avoided. That would allow more of the average users to join the fun, without spending $237 ... and some can't, because their hardware won't take more RAM.
SS: wheer are you seeing the 7.99 Avaialble figure? I have 9237 ish listed in Task Manager on the Performance tab, with 12GB Total as I should have
Obviously SnowSultan is using a 64-bit operating system, or he wouldn't be able to render in Iray. Let's move along.
There are some 64-bit versions of Windows that recognize only 8GB of RAM -- Windows Vista and Windows 7 HGome Basic, for example. It's an artificial restriction. There are other known limits depending on the motherboard and BIOS. I recall some older PCs would recognize only 2G per RAM slot, or 8G total, for four slots, for example.
Finally the GeForce GPUs don't *require* PCIe 3.0, but they tend to run a little faster than when using 2.0 x16. Any speed increase would be marginal for Iray, though. as there's not a lot of bus activity going on during a render.
Go into the BIOS and see if you can adjust the memory timings, manually. If you can, you may be able to bump it down a bit and have Windows see all of it.
Um...yeah. For that kind of money, that's the way I'd go too.
Did a quick test to see where the memory goes. Here's what I found. Maybe there's a way D|S could improve things:
1. Loaded a single G2F character, 4K textures, shirt and pants and hair. Before rendering, D|S takes 1.01 GB.
2. Did a CPU+GPU render. After scene building (the initial "rendering..." phase), RAM went to 2.9GB. The scene fills about 1.5GB in the GPU, according to GPU-Z. This is for a 4000x3000 render size (pretty big).
3. Did a GPU-only render. After scene building, RAM held steady at 2.5GB. So apparently, D|S is holding onto the scene database in RAM, even though the CPU is not involved in the render. Actually, you'd expect and want something like this, so that you can restart the render without having to wait for the database to be re-created. However, I feel that writing it to disk and releasing it from RAM should be at least an option. This would also permit saving scene databases for queued renders.
4. Repeated #3 with a 1000x1000 render. Memory dropped to 1.5GB during the render. We can use the difference as a baseline to estimate how much D|S uses to hold the larger canvas during the render -- in this case 1.0GB. The memory use didn't change much when reducing it down to just 100x100 pixels.
5. Finally, added a second character with clothes and hair. The full CPU+GPU render at 4K consumed 3.7GB, a difference of 800MB.
Extrapolating, three characters would fill about 4.6GB at rendertime for 4K. Is the prison set itself consuming 5GB? Sounds excessive.
Tobor, as a matter of interest did you look at the amount of GPU memory being used as well. Not that easy to guess too much, as quite a bit of GPU memory gets eaten by the system even in the simpliest of renders.
EDIT: Ignore this, sorry you did say, I really should read the whole post first!
And FWIW, the 1.5B is for the GPU that is not connected to the monitor. Idle it takes 31MB; during this particular render 1417MB.