Daz3D : 32Go or 64Go for big scenes ?

[Part]

Hello,

I have a problem with my big scenes in Daz3d : I don't have enough DDR3 (I have 24Go). Here is my setup :

Windows 10 64 bits
Asus Z-97A
Intel Core™ i7 4790k
Noctua NH-D15
Zotac Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 AMP Extreme
G.Skill Ares Blue Series 24 Go (2 x 8 Go + 2 x 4Go) DDR3 2133 MHz CL10 + 2 *4Go
SSD Samsung 840 EVO 500 Go
Seagate Barracuda Disque SATA III 7200 tours/min 3 To
Be Quiet ! Alimentation Dark Power Pro 10-1000W 80PLUS Gold

It seems that my DDR3 is full (I've launched the memory telemetry). And when it's full, it seems that the CPU is doing the render. So, I will buy some new memory :
but how much memory I need to render big scenes (5 or 6 characters, good environnement like "Z Coffee Shop") ? 32 Go or 64 Go ?

Second question : I have a GTX1080 with 8Gigo of memory. It seems that this kind of memory is full too in big scenes. Is that memory is important too ? Because, if I buy to have 64 Go of DDR3 and I'm block by the memory of my video card...

Third and the last one : Is there another way to do scenes with plenty of characters in Daz3d ? I have thought to render the same scene twice with half of the characters and mix it with photoshop.

Thanks

 

[Aeilion]

You can use the "spot render tool" and make renders of two or three characters at a time. You must remove the characters that are not present in the cut area (watch out for shadows). Then you start again with the other characters etc. Then you assemble everything under photoshop or gimp...

 

[Porcus Dev]

Second question : I have a GTX1080 with 8Gigo of memory. It seems that this kind of memory is full too in big scenes. Is that memory is important too ? Because, if I buy to have 64 Go of DDR3 and I'm block by the memory of my video card...

Yes, VGA VRAM is very important, if the scene you render doesn't fit in it, then your will render with CPU, that's probably your problem... at least I hope so, don't scary me, 24GB of RAM are a lot of RAM, I'm using 16

To test if this is the problem, you can download an utility called "GPU-Z", it's free.
Start your render and after some minutes open GPU-Z, go to sensors tab and look in RAM parameter, it indicates how much VGA VRAM are you using. Look at GPU Clock speed too to ensure if your VGA are working on render or not.

An as @Aeilion commented, instead of rendering 2 times the scenes and merge with photoshop, you can use spot render tool to reduce render time (select "spot render tool" and then in advanced tools select "new window", and finally select an area to render)

 

[f95zoneuser463]

It seems that my DDR3 is full (I've launched the memory telemetry). And when it's full, it seems that the CPU is doing the render. So, I will buy some new memory :
but how much memory I need to render big scenes (5 or 6 characters, good environnement like "Z Coffee Shop") ? 32 Go or 64 Go ?

That is not how things work and buying more RAM will not solve this problem. Assuming you use iRay: DAZ Studio did fall back to CPU-rendering because your graphicscard ran out of VRAM. It's very easy to blow though 8 GB VRAM of your card with only 2-3 characters in the scene. High resolution textures for characters and clothing are usually the main problem and eat up precious memory.
When you try to render your 5-6 character scene and the renderer falls back to the CPU check the logfile in DAZ Studio.
Help > Troubleshooting > View Log File ...
You should see some out of memory messages there that confirm this. (Don't know the exact message)

The system RAM is not the problem at all. (Unless your Windows 10 in configured wrong, like swapping/pagefile turned off). Every modern operating system has some kind of 'swap'-file / disk / partition. If the RAM is used by 100% the OS will simply use a disk as slow "reserve"-memory to keep the program running.

Unfortunately no consumer grade graphicscard with enough VRAM exist. Your options are:

• buy expensive
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• optimization

For optimization look up:

• DAZ Scene Optimizer
• Instancing
• Texture compression settings
• How to manually remove unnecessary textures and/or how to scale down textures.
• Try to split up scenes into foreground and background to combine rendered images later
• in case you use the DAZ 4.11 beta with the AI Denoiser: it requires additional VRAM, avoid in complex scenes

 

[Part]

Ouch. I love this forum and their members, there are so many things I learn just reading threads, and when I put a question somewhere, very nice interesting responses.

So, I've understand the difference between video card memory and DD3.

I will work on optimizations and spot rendering.

Thank you very much all !

 

[khumak]

This probably explains what I was seeing when I tried to do some renders as well. My CPU utilization was pegged at 100% and my GPU was barely used at all. My card only has 4GB though. I had been considering buying a new rig soon with a GTX 1080Ti, partly for gaming but also to play around with rendering, but it sounds like even that might not be enough VRAM to ensure that it uses the GPU instead of the CPU for renders. If that's the case I may as well just stick with my current system and it's lowly 1050Ti until I've proven to myself whether I can get good enough with Daz for it to be worth spending any money on hardware.

 

[OhWee]

Just a note on the ram thing, and also your 24 GB of system ram (DDR 4).

As you figured out based on the replies above, system ram is not the same thing as VRAM. So, as mentioned if the scene is bigger than the VRAM of the video card can hold, it sidelines the card, and the scene goes CPU only. Your system ram isn't used to store the scene of a GPU render (well maybe if you are doing CPU + GPU), although you use system ram to set up a scene in the Daz interface.

As far as what's recommended and useful for Daz, 16 GB of system ram is considered a comfortable minimum (some people manage with less). More than that is better up to a point, although more than 32 GB is usually considered overkill. So your 24 GB of system ram is plenty for Daz at the moment.

It's the graphics card that needs more VRAM, and unfortunately that means buying a new card with more VRAM. The larger cards (11 GB+) are rather pricey, although the 1080 Ti's have dropped a bit in price lately. If you live in the US, the recently imposed tariffs might offset further price drops a bit, so if they will drop much below the current minimum of $700 US in the near future is anyone's guess.

Also, keep in mind that Windows can use part of your hard drive as additional ram (paging files), so even if you fill up your system ram, it's not an 'absolute limit'. Excessive use of this feature can cause additional wear and tear on your drive, though, and of course accessing the information from the drive is MUCH slower than system ram, but it's better than nothing... This is part of the reason why 16 GB seems to work pretty well for most people - the larger scenes can 'cache' onto the drive, but of course large scenes that are CPU only take a LONG time to render.

If you are doing 3Delight instead of Iray (most people do Iray these days), then the graphics card isn't very important, as 3Delight renders are generally CPU only in Daz. I seem to remember some 3rd party render engines for 3Delight that might be able to use graphics cards (and possibly AMD cards as well as Nvidia ones), but that's another can of worms, and I'm not up to date on the developments on that front. Others can comment. I DO know that Blender can make use of AMD graphics cards, for example.

I have 8 GB video cards as well. With a bit of discipline, I can keep most of my scenes from going CPU only, as I know the limitations (not a lot of characters at once, etc.). But as mentioned above, things like Scene Optimizer can help with your texture sizes for larger scenes, which possibly can squeeze a larger scene with multiple characters, etc. into GPU memory with some work.

So I'd suggest looking into Scene Optimizer. I also find that using HDRI spheres (see HDRIHaven.com for free HDRIs) seems to help a bit on the lighting front, but this is less useful indoors. There are some indoor HDRIs, but camera angles can be a pain as the 'room' is really a sphere around the scene as opposed to having 3d walls, etc. I still manage though, within the limitations.

HDRIs are considered lazy though, and it's good to get a handle on good lighting techniques (lighting positioning, emissive planes, spotlights, etc.). But I find them to be nice timesavers... especially for outdoor scenes.

The other thing to do is to diligently hide the 'irrelevant' stuff that's outside of the camera frame. Some things need to stay (say an off-frame light source that's illuminating your character, that wall that's reflecting light, etc.), but yeah if you have a character outside of the frame, you may be better off hiding them, unless they are casting a shadow or something that appears in frame. Same for furniture, etc.

Low lighting is the enemy of Daz renders, which can really increase render times. But there are things you can do to make low lighting work (see the 'Show off your Daz 3D Skill' thread on this forum), which I'm not an expert on. Lighting can make or break decent looking renders, as you know. I'll leave it to the 'professionals' to explain how they do their awesome low light renders...

I'm getting off topic though. Again, look into Scene Optimizer, and there's probably a few youtube videos that talk about 'squeezing' larger scenes into VRAM. And get into the habit of hiding the stuff that's not in frame that isn't relevant to the lighting situation, etc.

 

[Rich]

Low lighting is the enemy of Daz renders, which can really increase render times. But there are things you can do to make low lighting work (see the 'Show off your Daz 3D Skill' thread on this forum), which I'm not an expert on. Lighting can make or break decent looking renders, as you know. I'll leave it to the 'professionals' to explain how they do their awesome low light renders...

There's at least one good tutorial related to doing night shots on the Daz forums:

You must be registered to see the links

 

[badsantagirl]

The GPU memory is kinda "prehistoric" system, because it is usualy software or driver managed, so technically you need as much VRAM as the actual scene needs. But there is some light at the end of the tunnel, because AMD designed a new kind of memory controller system, that actualy can access the OS managed CPU memory safely, and it can even address byte-based memories, such as SSDs. With this option the new theoretical limit is 256 TB for the Vega 56 and 64, and 512 TB for the professional Vega cards. Even if the hardware has much less physical memory (Vega 56/64 has 8 GB, the Frontier and the Pro Vega cards has 16 GB, while the SSG version has 2 TB), a compatible program can execute the rendering as long as you don't load a scene that is more than 256/512 TB large.

Without direct support from the program, the options are more limited, but HBCC segment is still works in the driver. It is possible to select half of the system memory for the Vega card, and than the driver will lie about the actual VRAM size. I use my Vega 56 with this option and every program thinks the card has 40 GB VRAM, and the trick is actually works.