The font size for daz (if you are using Windows 10 at least) is controlled via the general scaling parameter for the Windows environment.
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This change will make the font bigger in other apps and on the desktop too, but at least stuff will be a little more readable in Daz.
At least you have a 17.3" screen which is much nicer than say a 13.3". I learned Daz on a 13.3" laptop. I still use the smaller laptop for browsing these days, but am now using a desktop with a larger monitor for Daz.
Renpy is set up pretty much perfectly for the 'add characters over background thing', and rendering characters separately from their backgrounds (but with appropriate lighting) does reduce your render times, so if you have a few locations that you are going to re-using over and over, yeah you can do your game 'Lab Rats' style. I call it that because Lab Rats was the first Renpy game I spent any signiicant time modding back in the day.
You can also add the backgrounds behind characters in Photoshop (or GIMP, etc.), which can gives you a little more control over how bright/dark the background is, or other elements for each scene screen you have in mind as the dialogue progresses. Renpy has a few levers along these lines too that you could use 'ingame', but those generally just adjust the hue, etc. of the image.
If you can find decent HDRIs for lighting, those can provide you with some quick lighting as well. The site
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has a number of free HDRIs available, and you could use some of those as the 'environment' for one or more of your outdoor scenes (I particularly like the beach and forest themed ones). These are added via the Render Settings>Environment>Environment Map slider row, by clicking just to the left of the slider bar and browsing to wherever you have your HDRI installed.
Some Daz lighting sets and environments utilize the environment map image for the sphere around a scene as well. You'll need to set your viewport to Iray, and make sure that Dome is set to on (Dome and Scene or Dome only) to see the actual background in the viewport. If you set Dome to off, if the environment map is an HDRI (and providing lighting for the scene), you'll render the character without the background being visible, but with the environment dome still lighting up the character. So if it's the character and dome only (which is off), you'll get the transparent background plus the character, plus any objects that may be in the foreground (say a couch). You may also want to make sure that ground shadow is set to on, and perhaps set to manual. There is a setting that controls ground shadow intensity under Render Settings>Environment as well.
Note that the dome/environment map can be rotated in the render settings, as opposed to rotating the characters, if you want a differrent angle for the lighting being provided by the dome, and/or to adjust the orientation of the background if Dome is set to on.
If the HDRIs prove to be too resource intensive (I've had good luck with them), yeah as mentioned previously there's always the tried and true 'point light plus a spot light or two' approach.
With 3 GB of VRAM, yeah tricks like this one can help keep the scene overhead down, and hopefully you can shoehorn things into your card.
A couple of other tips are to use Scene Optimizer to reduce the sizes of your texture maps, and remove items of clothing that the camera doesn't see. Specifically boots/shoes, they can be resource hogs sometimes.
Genesis 8 characters often require larger amounts of VRAM than previous generations (not always), so using 'older' Daz characters can help keep your scene overhead a bit smaller. Genesis and Genesis 2 are in general a bit more VRAM friendly than Genesis 3 as well, but of course you will have a few less posing options for the character joints of the earlier characters as well, and of course they are older so getting the newer outfits to work on them can be hit or miss. Also, a number of older characters may not have Iray specific texture maps. The other maps will work, but you may want to use the Iray Uber Base shader on them so that they work a little better with Iray, and so that the 'sliders' under surfaces for those characters are similar to the Iray textured stuff you may be using already.
There's also some trick about losing bump maps/normals or something along these lines helping cut down character VRAM overhead in scenes, but as I have more VRAM in my system, that's one that I haven't had to do, so I don't remember exactly the details about that particular tip.
For Genesis 8, there's a product called
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which converts your characters to 'mapless', with a number of options for your skin textures. If you really want to use a Genesis 8 character(s) in your scene, but keep hitting the VRAM wall, yeah this can significantly reduce the VRAM overhead for characters, and also reduce your render times significantly in the process. There may be a product for previous gen characters that does this too, but I haven't come across it.
Anyways, there are a number of threads, here and on the Daz forum, that talk about ways to minimize scene VRAM overhead. If you keep having your renders drop to CPU only, yeah those might be worth googling.
