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...)
You must be registered to see the links
.
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...
