How big of a difference does CPU make in Daz Studio?
Diaspora
Posts: 523
Current deciding between the 8 core 9800X3D and the 16 core 9950X3D.
How big of a difference would that make in Daz Studio? How well does DAZ Studio utilize multiple cores?
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IMHO, it won't make a noticable difference which one you go with, the frequencies are just too close. I'd probably go with the 9950x3d, mostly because i do things outside studio that can use all those cores. I'd also do an 'overclock' to lock it at 5.7GHZ.
Studio doesn't really use more than one core for pretty much anything I'm aware of outside of rendering
"Studio doesn't really use more than one core for pretty much anything"
It would be very helpful if there was actually a list of what it does use multiple cores for, if anything.
One place where using multiple cores would make a lot of sense would be in a scene with multiple objects using smoothing, if every smoothing object got assigned to a specific core to speed that all up.
While rendering and dForce are the features that make heaviest use of multi-threading 9indeed, of the system in genreal) I do not belive they are the only areas thata re multi-threaded. I don't have a list of others, but I think there have been some mentions in the change log. It may also be, though again I can't verify, that some plug-ins are mutli-threaded where their tasks allow that
That's good to know.
Whenever I'm rendering animations it appears that each frame has two phases, one where the frame is being prepared and the other where the iray iterations are actually happening. In some scenes, especially those with strand based hair, that 'prep phase' can take quite a lot of time per frame, so if more cores can speed that along, that would make a world of difference in longer animations.
Task manager should let you see if that process is multi-threaded - divide 100 by your logical core count and that is roughly the prcentage use for a flat-out single thread in task manager, see what precentage of CPU DS is using in those cases. You are right about the two phaes - the scene data and the data needed for rendering are very different (DS needs to know about joints and morphs, Iray just wants the fianl shape; DS uses lower resolution maps and simpler materials in general, I ray wants the full material info.)
"Task manager should let you see if that process is multi-threaded"
Now I feel silly that I didn't think to do that, I'll try that out later today, thank you!
So, one thing I noticed is that if I am previewing an animation in the viewport, clicking play in the timeline, DAZ Studio is definitely using two cores during that (I don't know if it would use more cores with different kinds of scenes, ie more characters).
Oh wow, so I'm doing a test render right now with two characters, one of them has strand based hair, and DAZ Studio is putting all 12 cores to work during the 'loading phase' of rendering. So, it looks like I would get some value out of having as many cores as I can get.
here's a screencap of task manager, during those parts where it shows spikes before Iray starts iterating, Task Manager shows 100% utilization.
Thanks for checking it out.
Maybe "diminishing returns" though. It kinda looks like it's using all the cores for maybe 10-15 seconds - so if you only had half the cores (6), your render would take 10-15 sec longer, and if you had twice the cores (24) it would be 5-7sec faster.
Also the task may be limited by bandwidth to main memory, and as there's a lot of scene loading involved, that seems plausible. Unfortunately a core still counts as "utilized" even if it's waiting for a memory read to complete. In the worst case that 10-15 seconds is all spent moving stuff over the main memory bus - so there'd be no difference between 1 core or a 100 cores.
A 10-15 seconds memory transfer sounds huge, so it hopefully also does somewhat else.
If you want to see in details how Daz uses threads and cores you could run different scenarios and check your CPU in HWINFO: https://www.hwinfo.com/
I used it when I had i9 issues, it provides a lot of information.
+ you can log things and analyze the data after running your scenarios by importing the CSV in your favorite spreadsheet editor.