Daz Rendering Question regarding CPU/GPU

Feb 23, 2019
348
857
Recently I've been having some weird issues with rendering and what it renders on.

I have ticked my GPU on and the CPU off.

You guys have probably also encountered the fallback to CPU rendering when you go above video memory, so I have that in mind every time I set up a scene. It did fall back to CPU some times recently but only because I used those HEAVY houses and interiors from the DAZ3d store; so I've set up some new rooms with minimal stuff in them, to save the video memory for the characters and the grafts from, let's get real, Renderotica :p

Now, however, it renders on "nothing". Usually when it renders properly my GPU fans spin up and makes the room sound like when a jet is taking off @ ~100% load. Now the GPU is @ 25% load and my CPU is @ 21% load.... and it renders on like normal, but slower of course; I just do not understand DAZ sometimes. This occured mostly after installing the second to newest update to 4.20; and the initial infobox on what it starts rendering on is also gone. Plus my graphs when animating are often times gone entirely; even with advanced switched on. Is anyone else having these problems!?

Edit: Nevermind, it was Windows not showing my Utilisation correctly through the task manager. For some reason it shows it being very low, when Geforce Shadowplay shows it at 99%... but somehow the temperature is lower now; in hotter weather. Makes sense right :-D? I love computers!
 
Last edited:

MissFortune

I Was Once, Possibly, Maybe, Perhaps… A Harem King
Respected User
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Aug 17, 2019
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If you've unchecked CPU fallback, it shouldn't be falling back to CPU. You should be getting black screens if you run out of VRAM. Make sure you have all the boxs relating to CPU unchecked.

cpufb.png

Not sure what you're rendering with, but I'd be hard pressed to not recommend Scene Optimizer regardless of your GPU (except for 3090s. They probably don't need it.). It'll crunch down textures/maps of objects you select, giving your more VRAM to work with. Just don't use it on people or things you plan to zoom in on. Neither will look great if you do.

In the task manager, go to Performance > GPU > click one of the drop-down menus > Change it to CUDA. That'll give you a pretty good idea of what's going on with your GPU/Iray. Can't really help you with the Timeline issues, though. I usually animate manually with keyframes.
 
Feb 23, 2019
348
857
Thank you, I did have "Allow CPU falback" on and will definitely check out Scene Optimizer!... I also use manuel keyframes, but normally you have a graph that you can use to drag all keys up and down, left and right to your liking(and the rest will follow), even with facial expressions, so that you do not have to sit there and manage each and every one of them seperately. I am using a 3070 8Gb. BUT... for instance yesterday before going to bed, I finetuned an animation, closed down DAZ3d and everything else. Opened up Daz again and started rendering; then went to bed. When I got up today it had rendered 5 frames inside 5 hours; and obviously fell back to CPU. Then I closed down DAZ again and opened it, then started rendering a single frame, where it was able to render with the GPU, before reading your post and switching "Allow CPU fallback" to off. I feel like DAZ is so timeconsuming and fidgety no matter what you use. While it does not free up VRAM, I also use camera doctor for faster rendering times, and that doesn't do all that much either. If DAZ3d wasn't free I'd be outside of their office building throwing bricks into their cubicles.

Edit: Also have "Allow GPU detection" activated but I no longer get any information on VRAM usage in the render box either.
Edit 2: After unticking it wouldn't even start rendering; so I had to delete everything other than the absolute necessities in an already sparse scene. I get why people with a limited budget (like myself) would be turned off going into this initially. You'd need a friggin' 4 x Titan 24Gb graphics card set up to actually get some work done in this shit xD
 
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moose_puck

Active Member
Sep 6, 2021
740
1,677
Sometimes I think Daz Studio was created by some mad genius task force at Nvidea to boost sales of their high memory cards. After all, you can run almost any AAA game on a 4GB card.

I started learning Daz just about 3 months ago. I had a refurbished PC with 7th gen i5, 20GB ram and a pathetic 2GB GT-1030 vid card. With CPU only, I was doing pretty complicated scenes in 1080p that would take about 1.5-2 hours each. I quickly learned how to composite images in pieces and cut that down to about an hour for all the bits, plus the post processing time later on - thankfully though, I know the basics of Photoshop.

I just finished building a new PC, but I still can't budget in a Daz-specific card. At least I am running 10th gen Intel now with 32GB ram and a nicer GTX 1050Ti, but still only 4GB. I gave up trying to find some tricky DAZ setting to make my card use GPU only. Whatever time i saved on a render was wasted in playing with settings, so I leave things pretty much stock and let Daz decide on if it uses my GPU or CPU. Instead I concentrate on scene setup, lighting and locking in cameras so I can composite parts of the scenes to save time.

What I found though, is that even doing 99% of renders on CPU still, I can now do a decent 1080p render in an hour. So half the time. Smaller spot renders can be completed in 2-3 mins. So even those short 2-5 second duration spikes of GPU rendering before the Vram fills up, mixed in with the rest on CPU makes a difference. And, of course, 8 threads going 100% help a bit too.

And, btw.. I tried the scene optimizer and I had a hell of a time fixing things when some of the textures I optimized turned out to look crappy on the final renders. And it made very little difference in render times. I could see it making a difference if you were rendering a thousand animation frames or something, but for straight up slide by slide VN's, I don't see it as worth the headache.

Oh and gooHero - about your fan speed. I don't know if you are running something like this, but I use MSI Afterburner to control my CPU and GPU fans. I find it's a lot better then relying on Windows. And if you add the Krombuster plugin, you can see all you graphs just by clicking a button. It tracks everything and is easier to call up, over task manager.
 

EchoFoxtrot

"Wholesome Violence or Violently Wholesome"
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Sep 5, 2018
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I was wondering why my new system was slowing down, somehow the damn CPU fallback was back on
 

coffeeaddicted

Well-Known Member
Apr 13, 2021
1,825
1,481
Recently I've been having some weird issues with rendering and what it renders on.

I have ticked my GPU on and the CPU off.

You guys have probably also encountered the fallback to CPU rendering when you go above video memory, so I have that in mind every time I set up a scene. It did fall back to CPU some times recently but only because I used those HEAVY houses and interiors from the DAZ3d store; so I've set up some new rooms with minimal stuff in them, to save the video memory for the characters and the grafts from, let's get real, Renderotica :p

Now, however, it renders on "nothing". Usually when it renders properly my GPU fans spin up and makes the room sound like when a jet is taking off @ ~100% load. Now the GPU is @ 25% load and my CPU is @ 21% load.... and it renders on like normal, but slower of course; I just do not understand DAZ sometimes. This occured mostly after installing the second to newest update to 4.20; and the initial infobox on what it starts rendering on is also gone. Plus my graphs when animating are often times gone entirely; even with advanced switched on. Is anyone else having these problems!?

Edit: Nevermind, it was Windows not showing my Utilisation correctly through the task manager. For some reason it shows it being very low, when Geforce Shadowplay shows it at 99%... but somehow the temperature is lower now; in hotter weather. Makes sense right :-D? I love computers!
Yes, it's adventure land. Way before there was MS adventures.

Welcome to the world of silly computing.

I never encountered that problem to be honest.
Usually when i reinstall it because i like doing that.

But it stayed where it supposed to be.

As for fan, i use Noctua and i am quite happy with it. Very silent, even when full load.
Always check the fan from time to time because it happened to me that the fan actually was broken. Meaning, it still worked but was probably full of slug. If your environment isn't really clean of cat hair, dust, smoke etc.. check it.

You could use Hwinfo64 to see how hot it actually gets. It's a free tool. Just in case.

Btw. you probably should use an Iray Cam. So even you have a heavy scene, it will cut out whats not in your view thus saving you resources and rendering faster.
though this needs to be learned as walls are gone thus letting light flow in your scene.

I usually prefer small scenes.