Black screen in Daz
I made a post earlier but we didn't reach any solution so I try another go with more information.
Out of the blue a few weeks ago Daz "crashes" for me. Its not a blue screen crash because things in the background are still going. E.g if I'm listenting to a Youtube podcast I can still hear it going on and light is still being emitted from the PC and my peripherals. It just turns off the monitors. Only way to fix it is by doing a hard-reset on the PC. I've seen some similar threads were people say its a VRAM issue. Yet why would this happen to me out of the blue? Sure I only got 10gb of VRAM but that has always been enough and these aren't resource intensive scenes we are talking about. I've even done close-up 6 charachter renders before and it have worked fine. It can even occur during me playing around in Filament. I've been using Daz3D for a couple of years now, so I don't really get why this issue have popped up. I can't really troubleshoot the issue cause the screen turns black so I can't tell if Daz is giving me an error message or not. This issue is Daz exclusive. Meaning it doesn't happen to me when I render in Blender. I'm thinking its software based yet the only thing that's new is me downloading assets and updating Daz3D. But it happening out of the blue makes me think it must be something related to that but I don't know and I don't want to give up on my main 3D software. I read some other post about people saying that XTransfer plugins or OOT hair assets causes crashes, I have both of them.
Specs:
AMD Ryzen 5600X 6-Core Processor, 4200mhz
Corsair 16GB (2x8GB) DDR4 3600MHz CL18 Vengeance
ASUS GeForce RTX 3080 10GB TUF GAMING OC
PSU produce 900W, maybe a bit low for this spec but it has never been an issue in the past.
What I have done:
Updated to the latest version of Daz3D
Did a fresh install of the latest Nvidia driver with DDU
Benchmarked and troubleshoot both CPU & RAM (which are stable at 50c)
Cleaned the PC
Checked temps during load and they are about 70-80 at their most intense
Here is a example log:
2025-10-20 17:03:20.254 Iray [INFO] - MATCNV:RENDER :: 1.0 MATCNV rend info : found 194 textures, 0 lambdas (0 unique)
2025-10-20 17:03:20.255 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Emitter geometry import (1 light source with 2 triangles, 1 instance) took 5.900 us
2025-10-20 17:03:20.255 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Updating compiled material code.
2025-10-20 17:03:20.255 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Updating material textures.
2025-10-20 17:03:20.258 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Updating BSDFs.
2025-10-20 17:03:20.258 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Updating volumes.
2025-10-20 17:03:20.258 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Updating lights.
2025-10-20 17:03:20.258 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Updating object flags.
2025-10-20 17:03:20.258 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Updating decals.
2025-10-20 17:03:20.260 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Using iray core convergence estimate.
2025-10-20 17:03:20.260 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Allocating 1-layer frame buffer
2025-10-20 17:03:20.262 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Using interactive scheduling, caustic sampler disabled
2025-10-20 17:03:20.263 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Rendering with 1 device(s):
2025-10-20 17:03:20.263 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : CUDA device 0 (NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080)
2025-10-20 17:03:20.263 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Rendering...
2025-10-20 17:03:20.263 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.14 IRAY rend progr: CUDA device 0 (NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080): Processing scene...
2025-10-20 17:03:20.302 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.15 IRAY rend info : Importing lights for motion time 0
2025-10-20 17:03:20.302 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.15 IRAY rend info : Initializing light hierarchy.
2025-10-20 17:03:20.302 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.15 IRAY rend info : Light hierarchy initialization took 493.200 us
2025-10-20 17:03:20.305 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.14 IRAY rend info : CUDA device 0 (NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080): Scene processed in 0.042s
2025-10-20 17:03:20.306 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.15 IRAY rend info : CUDA device 0 (NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080): Allocated 11.616 MiB for frame buffer
2025-10-20 17:03:20.307 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.14 IRAY rend info : CUDA device 0 (NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080): Allocated 2.094 GiB of work space (2048k active samples in 0.000s)
2025-10-20 17:03:20.307 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.14 IRAY rend info : CUDA device 0 (NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080): Optimizing for cooperative usage (performance could be sacrificed)
2025-10-20 17:03:20.329 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Received update to 00001 iteration after 62.666 ms.
2025-10-20 17:03:20.330 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Rendering...
2025-10-20 17:03:20.374 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Received update to 00002 iterations after 102.712 ms.
2025-10-20 17:03:20.375 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Rendering...
2025-10-20 17:03:20.418 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Received update to 00003 iterations after 142.999 ms.
2025-10-20 17:03:20.419 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Rendering...
2025-10-20 17:03:20.462 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Received update to 00004 iterations after 182.830 ms.
2025-10-20 17:03:20.464 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Rendering...
2025-10-20 17:03:20.507 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Received update to 00005 iterations after 226.756 ms.
2025-10-20 17:03:20.550 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Received update to 00006 iterations after 268.478 ms.
2025-10-20 17:03:20.592 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Received update to 00007 iterations after 309.906 ms.
2025-10-20 17:03:20.634 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Received update to 00008 iterations after 352.121 ms.
2025-10-20 17:03:20.675 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Received update to 00009 iterations after 393.723 ms.
2025-10-20 17:03:20.717 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Received update to 00010 iterations after 435.476 ms.
2025-10-20 17:03:20.759 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Received update to 00011 iterations after 477.231 ms.
2025-10-20 17:03:20.801 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Received update to 00012 iterations after 519.387 ms.
2025-10-20 17:03:20.857 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Received update to 00014 iterations after 575.434 ms.
2025-10-20 17:03:20.925 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Received update to 00017 iterations after 643.529 ms.
2025-10-20 17:03:21.006 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Received update to 00021 iterations after 725.229 ms.
2025-10-20 17:03:21.101 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Received update to 00026 iterations after 819.348 ms.
2025-10-20 17:03:21.194 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Received update to 00031 iterations after 912.875 ms.
2025-10-20 17:03:21.287 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Received update to 00036 iterations after 1.006 s.
2025-10-20 17:03:21.382 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Received update to 00041 iterations after 1.101 s.
2025-10-20 17:03:21.539 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Received update to 00051 iterations after 1.259 s.
2025-10-20 17:03:21.724 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Received update to 00063 iterations after 1.442 s.
2025-10-20 17:03:21.919 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Received update to 00076 iterations after 1.638 s.
2025-10-20 17:03:22.117 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Received update to 00089 iterations after 1.836 s.
2025-10-20 17:03:22.311 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Received update to 00102 iterations after 2.030 s.
2025-10-20 17:03:22.506 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Received update to 00115 iterations after 2.225 s.
2025-10-20 17:03:22.701 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Received update to 00128 iterations after 2.421 s.
2025-10-20 17:03:22.898 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Received update to 00141 iterations after 2.616 s.
2025-10-20 17:03:23.093 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Received update to 00154 iterations after 2.812 s.
2025-10-20 17:03:23.288 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Received update to 00167 iterations after 3.007 s.
2025-10-20 17:03:23.483 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Received update to 00180 iterations after 3.202 s.
2025-10-20 17:03:23.679 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Received update to 00193 iterations after 3.398 s.
2025-10-20 17:03:23.875 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Received update to 00206 iterations after 3.593 s.
2025-10-20 17:03:24.071 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Received update to 00219 iterations after 3.789 s.
2025-10-20 17:03:24.266 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Received update to 00232 iterations after 3.985 s.
2025-10-20 17:03:24.461 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Received update to 00245 iterations after 4.180 s.
2025-10-20 17:03:24.656 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Received update to 00258 iterations after 4.376 s.
2025-10-20 17:03:24.874 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Received update to 00271 iterations after 4.593 s.
2025-10-20 17:03:25.084 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Received update to 00283 iterations after 4.802 s.
2025-10-20 17:03:25.258 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Received update to 00294 iterations after 4.976 s.
2025-10-20 17:03:25.445 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Received update to 00306 iterations after 5.164 s.
2025-10-20 17:03:25.634 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Received update to 00318 iterations after 5.353 s.
2025-10-20 17:03:25.820 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Received update to 00330 iterations after 5.539 s.
2025-10-20 17:03:26.017 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Received update to 00343 iterations after 5.736 s.
2025-10-20 17:03:26.218 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Received update to 00356 iterations after 5.937 s.
2025-10-20 17:03:26.420 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Received update to 00369 iterations after 6.139 s.
2025-10-20 17:03:26.621 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Received update to 00382 iterations after 6.340 s.
2025-10-20 17:03:26.815 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Received update to 00395 iterations after 6.533 s.
2025-10-20 17:03:27.012 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Received update to 00408 iterations after 6.730 s.
2025-10-20 17:03:27.207 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Received update to 00421 iterations after 6.926 s.
2025-10-20 17:03:27.404 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Received update to 00434 iterations after 7.123 s.
2025-10-20 17:03:27.606 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Received update to 00447 iterations after 7.325 s.
2025-10-20 17:03:27.812 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Received update to 00460 iterations after 7.531 s.
2025-10-20 17:03:27.997 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Received update to 00472 iterations after 7.716 s.
2025-10-20 17:03:28.193 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Received update to 00485 iterations after 7.912 s.
2025-10-20 17:03:28.393 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Received update to 00498 iterations after 8.111 s.
2025-10-20 17:03:28.597 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Received update to 00511 iterations after 8.316 s.
2025-10-20 17:03:28.786 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Received update to 00523 iterations after 8.505 s.
2025-10-20 17:03:28.973 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Received update to 00535 iterations after 8.692 s.
2025-10-20 17:03:29.159 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Received update to 00547 iterations after 8.878 s.
2025-10-20 17:03:29.356 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Received update to 00560 iterations after 9.074 s.
2025-10-20 17:03:29.553 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Received update to 00573 iterations after 9.272 s.
2025-10-20 17:03:29.751 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Received update to 00586 iterations after 9.469 s.
2025-10-20 17:03:29.948 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Received update to 00599 iterations after 9.666 s.
2025-10-20 17:03:30.145 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Received update to 00612 iterations after 9.864 s.
2025-10-20 17:03:30.348 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Received update to 00625 iterations after 10.067 s.
2025-10-20 17:03:30.717 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Received update to 00651 iterations after 10.435 s.
2025-10-20 17:03:31.418 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Received update to 00703 iterations after 11.137 s.
2025-10-20 17:03:32.514 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Received update to 00785 iterations after 12.233 s.
2025-10-20 17:03:33.760 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Received update to 00876 iterations after 13.479 s.
2025-10-20 17:03:35.072 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Received update to 00974 iterations after 14.790 s.
2025-10-20 17:03:36.543 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Received update to 01084 iterations after 16.261 s.
2025-10-20 17:03:38.172 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Received update to 01205 iterations after 17.891 s.
2025-10-20 17:03:39.937 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Received update to 01337 iterations after 19.656 s.
2025-10-20 17:04:02.889 [WARNING] :: \src\pluginsource\DzIrayRender\dzneuraymgr.cpp(373): Iray [ERROR] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.32 IRAY rend error: CUDA device 0 (NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080): Kernel [13] (MaterialSurface ) failed after 21.400s
2025-10-20 17:04:02.890 [WARNING] :: \src\pluginsource\DzIrayRender\dzneuraymgr.cpp(373): Iray [ERROR] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.32 IRAY rend error: CUDA device 0 (NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080): unknown error (while launching CUDA renderer in <internal>:904)
2025-10-20 17:04:02.890 [WARNING] :: \src\pluginsource\DzIrayRender\dzneuraymgr.cpp(373): Iray [ERROR] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.32 IRAY rend error: CUDA device 0 (NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080): Failed to launch renderer
2025-10-20 17:04:02.890 [WARNING] :: \src\pluginsource\DzIrayRender\dzneuraymgr.cpp(373): Iray [ERROR] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.14 IRAY rend error: CUDA device 0 (NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080): Device failed while rendering
2025-10-20 17:04:02.890 [WARNING] :: \src\pluginsource\DzIrayRender\dzneuraymgr.cpp(373): Iray [WARNING] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.14 IRAY rend warn : CUDA device 0 (NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080) is no longer available for rendering.
Any type of help would be appreciated. Thanks in advance!

Comments
It sounds like perhaps the graphics card is overheating maybe? The monitor switching off after a while of rendering without it being a crash does kinda sounds like it could be that. I know you have said you checked temps but was that CPU or GPU? Can you take the case apart enough to check that all that fans are spinning freely while it renders? If they are but it looks dusty inside it might be worth a few squirts with some canned air.
The other thing could be a dodgy asset. Have you tested renders with completely different scenes? - i.e. with zero assets in common between them in order to rule that out. I am no expert on diagnosing error logs but the first failure being a MaterialSurface might indicate some texture/shader that is causing your setup issues so making sure to do some very distinct tests would help there.
When I checked temps it was on both the GPU and CPU and I did them with an open case actually. The dust before my spring cleaning was minimal but I still did it.
The MaterialSurface error is the first time I hear off. I know you mentioned that you aren't an expert in diagnostics but would you know of any kind of way for me to locate said dodgy asset? Cause I have a lot of assets downloaded and trying to figure out which one might be a hassle without any sort of direction to go on. Thank you for your input!
Well, downloaded assets wouldn't be the issue as iray would only be processing the materials actually present in the current scene. I also believe you are right to discount the "black screen relating to VRAM" since in that case the render actually "completes" with a 100% black render displayed in the window rather than the whole monitor display doing dark. You also get a different error relating to exceeding the ram and not being able to fallback to CPU which is not present in your error log.
The best way to check to see if this is the issue would be to open up some of your older scenes that used to work and re-render some of those. It seems like your current scene is causing the failure after 20 seconds and so it shouldn't take long to work out if the older scenes are fine. If those olders scenes also fail then it might be driver or hardware issues - or perhaps some software issue with Daz Studio. You can try switching out your nvidia driver - I know you said you updated to the latest version but sometimes the latest version has issues (although then there is usually other posts here about it). There are also two versions - gaming and studio so it might be that you need to try the other one. Also, you can try rendering your scene in either the Daz Studio Beta or 2025 Alpha to see if a different version of Daz Studio will work on the scene.
If the older renders still work then it's likely that there is some asset that is causing the problem. If that is the case then I unfortunately do not know of a "good" way to figure out what it is. There is the "divide and conquer" approach of removing half the items and then seeing if it renders, if fails then you know its one of those so remove half again and re-render, if any renders pass then the finger of blame can point to the ones you just removed so swap the assets around. Keep splitting things in half until you have only 1 product remaining that won't render even on it's own. Unfortunately, this method is far from ideal since not only are you having to force-reboot on every failure but it's quite time-consuming and only works if there is a product that causes an issue on it's own - if the issue is caused by a material interacting with a specific amount of light/shadow or whatever then you'll likely not trigger the failure after splitting up the scene. I don't know if it's possible to run Daz Studio with an extra parameter to output even more debugging logs.
I've tried with fresh scenes with no common assets but I will try and go back to some really old renders if the problem still persists then I think I can eliminate the asset theory. I also want to try an older version, more stable version of Daz3D but there is no way for me to get my hands on it officially from the Daz3D team. Been in contact with their support team about this aswell. So I'm kinda at a loss. I will try to see what happens when I go back to older scenes and get back to you as soon as I can.
You can try rendering with your CPU only... if it works, usually there shouldn't be an error from Daz assets.
In NVIDIA control panel, restore settings of Daz Studion.
Besides, have you recently installed or updated any packages of NVidia CUDA Kit ? If you have, uninstall them all and try again ~