Daz Studio 4.11 Beta Users: Your experience so far...

OhWee

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Hey Daz dev artist types!

I'm looking at picking up an RTX 2080 (not the Ti, that's too expensive for me right now). The performance of the 2080 has been comparable in benchmarks to the 1080 Ti, but of course there's still that 6.4 GB Memory limit (stupid Windows VRAM tax!). I've been working with dual 1080s for a while now (that system just died), so my scenes are 'optimized' to fit that limitation.

1080 Tis are unreasonably expensive again (over $1100 US), so I won't be grabbing one of those. For that kind of money, might as well spend an extra hundred or two for the 2080 Ti...

Also, while I've read about the 2080Ti's having reliability issues, I haven't heard similar things about the 2080s - I've seen a comment or two that the 2080's are faring better than the 2080 Ti's are, but yeah you never know with comments on the internet. The $500 or so cheaper thing is the bigger thing for me. Anyways...

The RTX cards supposedly work better with the 4.11 Beta from what I've read. So this means that I'll probably be installing the beta build in my next system. I've heard good things about the denoiser helping with render times, but not much else. So my question to y'all is, how has the beta been working so far for you?

Is it reasonably stable? Glitchy? Weird Issues? Works OK? I'm interested to hear your experiences with the 4.11 Beta build!
 

Cohibozz

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i'm using beta build from release beta. it work good. The best feature is the denoiser filter. I ue it for faster preview and also for reduce the render iterations in most of render. it is not so good for Hair (less iterations+denoiser = plastic hair). but for locations and other stuff the fenoiser is the best way to fast render a good image.

no bug for me in 4.11 beta.
i've installed in different location from 4.10 stable. but i think i can remove 4.10. 4,11 works good
 
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Krosos

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Yeah because that Denoiser is only working on the Post level it is far behind Octanes full Layer Denoise

you have todo a lot of workarrounds for the hair to not endup that way it is possible but it highers render times again and overall you have to fix so much in i-ray for good human stable rendering it is useless in the way it comes with Daz you do so much hit and miss.

And all these workarounds existing and being applied only drive render times higher and higher and Nvidia cares shit in the contrary they are happy you buy the 2080 for their inefficient renderer crap.

Well done Nvidia well done.
 
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Loys

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So my question to y'all is, how has the beta been working so far for you?

Is it reasonably stable? Glitchy? Weird Issues? Works OK? I'm interested to hear your experiences with the 4.11 Beta build!
I'm using 4.11 beta for several months now and i'm absolutely happy with it! Because of new denoiser. The build is pretty stable, the denoiser does a fantastic job. Yes, it often washes out the details of the skin (bump effects) and the hair. But still i get a render with no grains and after that i can use Spot Render Tool to make another render of just hair and body with more iterations. As a result i spend less time to get finished image than i spent when i was using 4.10.

I hope this information helps. Sorry for any language mistakes(
 
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Krosos

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Btw not only Hair can get handled wrong by the AI teeth is also a problem depending on the lighting, everything of very fine complex detail structure actually is prone to fail.



here you see both failing
 

Aeilion

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4.11 ....

- The Denoiser is good when you don't have a character of quality(skin, hair etc..) in the scene. So maybe it will not serve you very much but it is still better than what we have in 4.10.

- A slight higher requirement in memory, I don't know why. It is not very annoying if you don't skim the limits of your CG. Just that if you go on a 2080 you will potentially fall on more cases where you have a lack of memory for your scene and it will sometimes be only because you use the 4.11.

- I found that there was a slight improvement in the loading of scenes / characters etc ... Faster than in 4.10

- You will see a big change in the management of the setting. At the level of the sample and convergence rate it is not at all the same. 1000 samples in 4.10 does not correspond to 1000 in 4.11 ditto for the convergence rate.

I imagine there are other changes but nothing that has particularly marked me.

So... I would say that it may be interesting to use the 4.11 but without the Denoiser in the majority of cases.
 

Krosos

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Not only Skin also very high quality Archviz can faill it depends what the AI thinks is details or noise you can lose very fine strucutures everywhere though you might not notice it like always if you don't compare as the Denoiser is based on Psychovisual estimation on 1 entire frame.

The VRAM memory requirement comes through the Denoiser the post per frame needs a certain Amount of VRAM reserved that is measured at around 500 mb per frame at UHD

if you lose that the Denoiser will disable itself it is not possible to really control this it depends on overall scene complexity.

There is a higher chance loosing the Denoiser if Optix Acceleration is enabled or the I-Ray Preview as both consume the VRAM additionaly (which by default it isn't).

Or like any other background task like Firefox or Chrome everything that runs on VRAM virtualy everything on Windows 10 and has a bad sharing strategy or space sharing protection.
 

f95zoneuser463

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I don't know about upgrading right now. It's like buying a Porsche that is limited to driving 75 mph / 120 kmh.
The RTX cards may be faster, but the RT-cores are still unused due to the lack of software-support. Since these are specialized cores designed to accelerate ray tracing the unused potential is huge. First Nvidia has to update the Iray Plugin. Then this Iray version also has to be implemented in DAZ. It could take years to really take full advantage of these cards.

Problems I had with 4.11 so far:
  • A character glitching out and getting corrupted/distorted when posed and saved in 4.11. It was broken forever then. No matter what version of DAZ I used to load it again, it was corrupted. I'd advise to always keep a copy of original characters saved with stable 4.10. It's VERY rare though, but it can be fatal because the corruption is not visible in the T-pose. (It's not a morph thing btw., I've seen people reporting similar things on the DAZ forum)
  • I don't remember exactly what I did, but there was a reproducible way to crash DAZ 4.11 with Geometry Editor if you did a specific thing in the Tool Settings-tab, just save before touching anything in that tab, that's not fixed yet, I remember testing the same in 4.10 and it did not crash
  • Some other crash bugs in older builds than 4.11.0.236 got fixed already and this build is definitely more stable than the earlier 4.11 builds
The denoiser has already been discussed here many times. It's a trade off between lower quality + higher VRAM usage vs faster rendering times. A denoised image will always have a lower quality. People will use it anyway. It's just one of those things where preaching is pointless.

creator A with quality standards: That looks like denoised low quality smeared garbage shit!
creator B: What? No! 200 iterations with denoiser looks good to me.
typical supporter: Creator B made so much content! Please make more fast. Plx very fast!... faster plx ... more plx! MOAR!
creator B: Cool I can make a Patreon with this shit and ask for money.
creator A: *still rendering*
typical supporter: You suck creator A! Where is the content?
That's why denoisers will win.

@OhWee
but of course there's still that 6.4 GB Memory limit (stupid Windows VRAM tax!)
I'm confused, what do you mean by Windows VRAM tax? A 6.4 GB Memory limit?
 
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Krosos

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You are wrong

That's why denoisers will win.
Thats why Realtime Hybrid will win and nothing else Nvidia strives for I-ray is just bait ;)


Also a slightly denoised image doesn't have to be bad especially not in the case of I-ray

problematic are zones where the AI fails completely.
 

OhWee

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I don't know about upgrading right now. It's like buying a Porsche that is limited to driving 75 mph / 120 kmh.
The RTX cards may be faster, but the RT-cores are still unused due to the lack of software-support. Since these are specialized cores designed to accelerate ray tracing the unused potential is huge. First Nvidia has to update the Iray Plugin. Then this Iray version also has to be implemented in DAZ. It could take years to really take full advantage of these cards.

Problems I had with 4.11 so far:
  • A character glitching out and getting corrupted/distorted when posed and saved in 4.11. It was broken forever then. No matter what version of DAZ I used to load it again, it was corrupted. I'd advise to always keep a copy of original characters saved with stable 4.10. It's VERY rare though, but it can be fatal because the corruption is not visible in the T-pose. (It's not a morph thing btw., I've seen people reporting similar things on the DAZ forum)
  • I don't remember exactly what I did, but there was a reproducible way to crash DAZ 4.11 with Geometry Editor if you did a specific thing in the Tool Settings-tab, just save before touching anything in that tab, that's not fixed yet, I remember testing the same in 4.10 and it did not crash
  • Some other crash bugs in older builds than 4.11.0.236 got fixed already and this build is definitely more stable than the earlier 4.11 builds
The denoiser has already been discussed here many times. It's a trade off between lower quality + higher VRAM usage vs faster rendering times. A denoised image will always have a lower quality. People will use it anyway. It's just one of those things where preaching is pointless.

creator A with quality standards: That looks like denoised low quality smeared garbage shit!
creator B: What? No! 200 iterations with denoiser looks good to me.
typical supporter: Creator B made so much content! Please make more fast. Plx very fast!... faster plx ... more plx! MOAR!
creator B: Cool I can make a Patreon with this shit and ask for money.
creator A: *still rendering*
typical supporter: You suck creator A! Where is the content?
That's why denoisers will win.

@OhWee

I'm confused, what do you mean by Windows VRAM tax? A 6.4 GB Memory limit?
It has been well documented that Windows 10 limits the amount of VRAM that any single program to around 82% of the total VRAM available (90% of 90%). The thought here is to not let any one program hog all of the VRAM, but this limitation is more aggressive than previous versions of Windows. Several people that use rendering solutions (not just Daz) have noted that scenes which could fit in their VRAM in previous Windows versions (mostly Windows 7) are now dropping to 'CPU only' in 10, in some cases forcing them to cut back a few things to get the scenes to fit inside the new restriction.

Linux users do not face this restriction (for those rendering programs that have Linux options, Daz doesn't have a viable Linux option yet). The -18% restriction simply isn't there in Linux.

People have been asking Microsoft (or Nvidia) for a 'fix' for this, or at least a reduction of this percentage, for several years now, but it's mostly fallen on deaf ears. Microsoft techs point the fingers at Nvidia, and vice versa... publicly shaming Microsoft on this (there are several public threads that document the issue, both on the Microsoft site and on several other rendering oriented sites) simply hasn't worked so far.

I'd be good if it set aside a fixed amount of ram, instead of a percentage, or if there was a toggle somewhere to 'override' this behavior. Supposedly the Quadro cards can get around this restriction, but the mentions of that are rather scarce so I don't know how true that is.

The 18% becomes rather onerous with the larger cards, say the 11 GB 1080 Ti cards. The 6.4 GB available that I mentioned is what most of us 1080 users have been seeing regularly in Daz.

---

As for why I'm forced to upgrade right now, well my dual 1080 laptop is dead/mostly dead. I can't even access the Bios, although I do get to the pretty splash screen. I could send it in to see if MSI could fix it, but it'd be without the drives (yeah, they don't need to see my porn renders). The drives should be still intact (the way the failure happened, with increasingly longer boot times without accessing any of the drives for an hour or more, until the BIOS/boot cycle finally accessed the drives) just completely failed, is a documented MSI issue among a number of users, and the 'interim fixes' (remove/reset battery, flip UEFI with something on or off, reinstall/reset windows, etc.) are no longer an option for me (I've done a few of these a couple of times now in the past) as the BIOS is no longer accessable.

Even if MSI were able to fix it (it's not under warranty anymore, and is several years old, so it'd cost me), there's no guarantee of the problem not reappearing later, so I'm kinda done with MSI for now. Time to move on. I'll scavenge the blu ray and other drives for my next system, and maybe the 64 GB of ram if I end up getting another laptop that uses DDR4 sodimms.

The graphics card market is not ideal at the moment, and the newly imposed US tariffs aren't helping, but right now the 10xx cards are almost/are as expensive the 20xx cards, so might as well go the 20xx route, as the 20xx cards are faster than their 10xx counterparts - the 2080 (non Ti) is as fast/slightly faster than the 1080 Ti in rendering, in several benchmarks, including the Daz Iray benches.

But I'm only building an 'interim' system for now, and saving the 'big' upgrade until later when the 7nm CPUs finally drop, along with their associated mobo solutions. This is why I'm picking 'just' a 2080 instead of something bigger (the 2080 is a bit more budget friendly to my limited budget for this build), as this interim system will move to my entertainment center once the new CPUs hit general availability. Yeah you can use the currently available boards with the upcoming AMD processors, but see there's this PCIe4 rumor floating around. EPYC will support PCIe4 (and some existing EPYC boards may be able to do this with just a BIOS flash), the question is - will 7nm Threadripper get the same option 6-8 months from now...

My interim system is going to be a SFF/Mini ITX build, with portability in mind (the case comes with a handle option...)
.
It'll look good in the entertainment center when I migrate it there, once the stuff for the 'full rendering station' becomes available, but may still use this SFF system to set up Daz scenes for full rendering on the 'full system', which should work particularly well when doing animated sequences. And it can accommodate my slim Blu Ray player from my now dead/mostly dead MSI...

As to why Threadripper, that's easy. 64 PCIe lanes... Plus Intel is more expensive these days, and the 7nm AMD CPUs should be VERY competitive. Threadripper is already compelling at 12nm, 7nm... well I'm sure Lisa Su will talk about 7nm Consumer CPUs next week, and we already have the 'marketing slides' for 7nm EPYC, which look quite promising for the other 7nm CPUs. While a 64 core Threadripper hasn't been confirmed yet (64 core EPYC HAS been confirmed), well Intel DID announce that 48 core HEDT processor in May/June of last year, which STILL hasn't hit the market...

I'm looking to the future when PCIe 4 cards finally become available, and want to build my 'full' render system with a bit of future proofing in mind. Sure, PCIe 4 won't benefit rendering much at all, but graphics card manufacturers will embrace PCIe 4 eventually...
 
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Krosos

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The graphics card market is not ideal at the moment, and the newly imposed US tariffs aren't helping, but right now the 10xx cards are almost/are as expensive the 20xx cards, so might as well go the 20xx route, as the 20xx cards are faster than their 10xx counterparts - the 2080 (non Ti) is as fast/slightly faster than the 1080 Ti in rendering, in several benchmarks, including the Daz Iray benches.
Let me guess exactly +10 FPS for a complex DX11 rendering stack in UHD for the standard cards and roughly +5 fps more the higher the OC cards go ;)

i doubt Nvidia left their normal balancing only because of RTX.

More interesting would be how Async improved but i guess they still stuck their with only shuffiling driver resources around as efficiently as possible.

Main Problems on Windows 10 come from the Fact that it was Designed mainly for AMDs advances in their Hardware pipeline Nvidia suffered big time with the Move to Windows 8/10.

It was no surprise that Microsoft gave them the Head start at Build showing their Advances as Nvidia was pissed suddenly working on so many driver workarounds to grant stability, that they wanted to showcase with Forza "we are ready first", though they had so many time given to change the hardware by Microsoft. ;)
 

OhWee

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Let me guess exactly +10 FPS for a complex DX11 rendering stack for the standard cards and roughly +5 fps more the higher the OC cards go ;)
The is rather convoluted, so you need to look over several posts for comparisons, but this V-ray benchmark link is representative of what people have been seeing with 2080 render times, vs the 1080 Ti, in various rendering programs...



As for other uses for the 2080, well it'll still be overkill for me (I like turn based games, not FPS shooters), but it should be good for a 4K TV when watching Blu Rays, plus doing rendering on the side of course...
 
D

Deleted member 1115199

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creator A with quality standards: That looks like denoised low quality smeared garbage shit!
creator B: What? No! 200 iterations with denoiser looks good to me.
typical supporter: Creator B made so much content! Please make more fast. Plx very fast!... faster plx ... more plx! MOAR!
creator B: Cool I can make a Patreon with this shit and ask for money.
creator A: *still rendering*
typical supporter: You suck creator A! Where is the content?
That's why denoisers will win.
He is right, 20xx series doesn't work well and only can work in 4.11. Ditch the denoiser, it's not progressive, if you call 5 times comparing and denoising the images then well I don't know what else to say. You will get render like 10x faster with it but say goodbye to any skin detail and hello plastic look. Another thing is Optix prime doesn't work either on 20xx series only makes renders slower. Yes renders are faster comparing 1080ti with 2080ti but that's just the raw difference in core count and raw TFLOPS of power. The real power of RT cores is yet to be unleashed and don't believe the "It just works" because it doesn't at all.
 
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OhWee

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He is right, 20xx series doesn't work well and only can work in 4.11. Ditch the denoiser, it's not progressive, if you call 5 times comparing and denoising the images then well I don't know what else to say. You will get render like 10x faster with it but say goodbye to any skin detail and hello plastic look. Another thing is Optix prime doesn't work either on 20xx series only makes renders slower. Yes renders are faster comparing 1080ti with 2080ti but that's just the raw difference in core count and raw TFLOPS of power. The real power of RT cores is yet to be unleashed and don't believe the "It just works" because it doesn't at all.
Just noting that I'm likely going with a 2080 (Non Ti) for now, which has comparable render times to the 1080 Ti, but with less VRAM of course, and is MUCH cheaper. 1080 Ti's are too expensive for my budget right now. As to the denoiser issues, well that's why I posted up this thread, to see what issues people were having. And also other issues in general - I've seen a few comments in the beta thread (Daz forum) about eyes having issues...

If I understand correctly, I can choose to NOT use the denoiser though, that is an option, right?
 

Krosos

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He is right, 20xx series doesn't work well and only can work in 4.11. Ditch the denoiser, it's not progressive, if you call 5 times comparing and denoising the images then well I don't know what else to say. You will get render like 10x faster with it but say goodbye to any skin detail and hello plastic look. Another thing is Optix prime doesn't work either on 20xx series only makes renders slower. Yes renders are faster comparing 1080ti with 2080ti but that's just the raw difference in core count and raw TFLOPS of power. The real power of RT cores is yet to be unleashed and don't believe the "It just works" because it doesn't at all.
Plastic look doesn't have to be it depends on the AI and also the whole light balancing Octane tries to take both into account it is a marvelous engineering job they do, also if Urbach is partly not speaking the truth to the masses about the Free stage of it he was very deceiving about what and for who will become free, but he can allow himself to because I-ray is no way any competition and Nvidia will hold still ;)

No one believes I-ray is production ready but Nvidia uses it cleverly in markets like Daz or now also Reallusion to sell their Hardware ;)

And users like OhWee are the perfect example it works :D
 
D

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@OhWee Yes you don't need to use denoiser if you don't want to, 4.11 is better especially for pascal as it has updated Iray to "work" with Volta and Turing and is actually faster on Pascal than in version 4.10. Beta has a problem with eyes when Memory optimization selected and a whole lot of problem with that setting not just with eyes.

@Krosos Octane render or OTOY as a company in general I think already have RT core support working, don't know if for public but they said it's 8x faster or to be exact 400M rays vs 3.2B per second.
 

Krosos

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Yep eye fails too like teeth often depending on the distance but eye fails too and then it's really bad

For most the Denoiser is going to fail anyways if it cant consume enough memory after kernel compilation.
 

OhWee

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@OhWee Yes you don't need to use denoiser if you don't want to, 4.11 is better especially for pascal as it has updated Iray to "work" with Volta and Turing and is actually faster on Pascal than in version 4.10. Beta has a problem with eyes when Memory optimization selected and a whole lot of problem with that setting not just with eyes.

@Krosos Octane render or OTOY as a company in general I think already have RT core support working, don't know if for public but they said it's 8x faster or to be exact 400M rays vs 3.2B per second.
I'd love to 'look under the hood' to see how they achieved that 8x speedup in Octane. Daz is notoriously slow with implementing features, so who knows if/when we'll see RT support in Daz Studio.

Still, though, 8x? Really? I'm heavily invested in Iray (most of my Daz product library favors Iray, and I've never messed with 3Delight), but that makes me want to at least research Octane now...
 

Krosos

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Daz is very restrictive on changes (stability) but the core Power Nvidia holds what gets implemented what's not and when for DAZ

Though if i see most of these VN results i feel heavily Production Ready
 
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I'd love to 'look under the hood' to see how they achieved that 8x speedup in Octane. Daz is notoriously slow with implementing features, so who knows if/when we'll see RT support in Daz Studio.

Still, though, 8x? Really? I'm heavily invested in Iray (most of my Daz product library favors Iray, and I've never messed with 3Delight), but that makes me want to at least research Octane now...
RT cores are designed for one thing, to trace rays from camera to objects and if they are not programmed they don't work because they are not just regular SM cores. I had a debate with my uncle if these tensor cores could be used for regural rendering, like if we really need FP32 precision or FP16 would suffice.
 
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