Ram settings for Daz
sarge74
Posts: 121
Just got my new machine built. Windows 7 64 bit, 8 gig, AMD Phenom II, EVGA GeForce GTX560 video card. Running DAZ 4 pro.
Renders are going much faster.
Got a couple questions if you experts wouldn't mind...
When doing a serious render, in the task manager, I rarely see the memory go beyond 3.5GB with the CPU usage at 100%. Is there a way to set up my machine to get DAZ to use more of my 8 GB of ram to speed up render times?
Second, can you suggest good tuts for realistic render settings? Not necessarily using preset lights and stuff like Uber environments and other packs, but setting up your own light sets and render settings. There are so many tweeks that can be made with lights, shadows, ray tracing, ect. ect. It gets overwhelming trying to trial and error.
Thanks so much everyone.
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Okay, first it's your CPU/s that renders, the more RAM the larger/more complex a scene you can render before your render crashes from from lack of Ram. Lighting is a big part of better renders but so are better render settings. You can find some recommended render settings in some of the threads, I use a set from adamr001 that you can find by following his link in any of his taglines from a post.
I'm not aware of anyway to get DS to use RAM for faster renders.
Thanks for the reply, Jade rail. I DID upgrade my cpu from athlon to phenom II so that helped right? Don't get me wrong, I'm rendering faster than I was before and its great. I was just wondering why DAZ wasn't using more RAM. I'm sorry I'm not that tech savvy.
I will check out Adam001's links. Thanks for the suggestion.
Much Appreciated.
It's Cool, most folks dont understand the differance. Your CPU speed is the important part for speed. Ram plays more of a role with Size of items / scene. Enjoy your rendering.
OK, I'm still trying to figure all this out. Something to me seems out of whack. I've been watching my Resource Monitor closely. Tonight I was doing a big render with a Raytraced distant light and some buildings. The render maxed my Task manager at 100% using about 4 GB of Ram. My machine has 8. Nearly half of my memory is listed in the dark blue as Standby with a sliver of light blue as free. I was told on some windows message boards that when the machine needed more Ram, it would take from standby. So while my machine was rendering I went into Photoshop to work on a previous render. Photoshop was so sluggish I couldn't even work. Resource manager upped the green "In use" memory to 4.9 GB (Daz listed as using 94% of that) but left about 3.1 GB in standby and about 690 MB listed as free. Its running that way right now as DAZ is rendering and I'm actually experiencing lagging in my type at this very moment. I've got over 3 gig on my machine that I need to use that is in this Standby category. What if anything can I do to be able to use this. Why won't windows free this up and allocate it to Daz or another program. The whole reason I saved up for these new up grades was so I could work while DAZ rendered.
Any suggestions?
Thanks
I lower the DAZ Studio process priority. It still renders fine, but gives priority to other applications that I am using. You could also use Task Manager to set the DAZ Studio process affinity to use only some of your cores, leaving others available to other processes.
DAZ will not use more memory if that is all that there is in the scene. If you put 6 Gigs of models and textures into the scene then Studio will need 6 Gigs plus a little extra memory to operate. The OS will need some too.
Optimising the memory load to keep it as low as possible is the way to maximise performance, not the other way around. The extra memory you have available is breathing space and will increase system stability as well as giving you room to grow a scene if you want.
Basically what I am saying is that you are ok on memory and your processors are maxing out so that's operating at max efficiency.
Hey thanks for helping me understand how my computer runs via DAZ, everyone. Very informative. So then what is all that Standby memory good for? Did I really need to install 8 gigs of ram when all my processor can use is less than 6?
Again I sure appreciate you all helping me understand all this.
It will come in handy sometimes, I promise. I have a few scene files that will push mine to over 80% and like you I have 8Gb of Ram. I sometime set my Daz/Lux (Thats Reality) to render with four of my 8 threads and I can then do anything else at the same time. Play in 2D art, surf the web anything just like nothing was going on. It really is nice to have the freedom when you need it.
Really? That sounds awesome! You wouldn't mind sharing how you did that would you? What are "threads" in the CPU? Where in Windows 7 do you make these settings? Or is it in DAZ.
I've been reading about the Reality Lux render engine. Sounds cool. How do you like it?
Thanks again for all your help Jaderail. Very generous.
I have a quad core i7 CPU with multithreading, with that most software sees my CPU as a 8 core, it helps speed wise. Example of that, when I render with Daz I get 8 buckets rendering at once instead of the four most quads get. You can change the priority of any program running with the task manager, Just Google Setting Priority in Win7 for a good explaination. Daz runs at Normal as a Default.
As for Reality you are looking at another learning curve. But I like it so much I will not install DS4.5 because my bought Third party plugin (reality was built by a none Daz programmer, that's third party) will not run in it. The lighting is so life REAL it's very awesome. But be warned to get good renders of even a simple scene it takes hours ans hours some times. Reality sends your scene to another Render engine called LuxRender. The output once you learn can look great. I don't use it often but I do recommend it if you want renders like this.
It might help people's understanding to actually bring in a couple of technical terms. Processes can be subject to being CPU-Bound, where the limiting factor is CPU processing power, or Memory-Bound, where the limiting factor is the amount of available memory. Computer graphics is vulnerable to both of these, with CPU power needed to do all the calculations involved in a render, and Memory needed to hold all of the textures, and to a lesser degree models, which are the raw data for the calculations.
Memory has tended to dominate rendering in the past, large textures would run computers out of memory, requiring the textures needed at any one point to be paged in and out of memory, reading them off disk-storage, which is very slow to access in comparison to RAM. That meant the processor sitting around at less than full usage, because it is waiting for the data it needed to be loaded into memory. The process was Memory-Bound.
But as onboard memory has gotten larger, you now get many renders where the needed textures can all be held in RAM at the same time, which allows the processor to do the calculations just as fast as it can. So having RAM less than 100% used with all textures loaded, is a good thing, because it then allows the processor to push its own usage up to 100%. To go faster you would have to increase processor speed - so the process is CPU-bound.
Create a complex enough scene and you can still run your computer out of memory and have the CPU sitting idel, so people picking a computer for computer graphics need to consider both the fastest processor they can afford, and as much memory as their machine and the relevant software and operating system can support. A computer is working most efficiently when CPU usage is maxed at 100%, but Memory usage is less than 100%.
I think what is killing you is not Daz Studio. It is another active program, maybe an anti-virus or too many programs running from start up. A good example is if you have a Symantec product including Norton or PCTools. These things eat your resources and access to RAM incredibly. I used to use PCTools, but when Symantec bought them the load went way up. I was down to 6MB left after hardware reserved. I removed it and went up to 1400. that is with 4 gig ram. Virtual memory also play a pretty big part in it.
for the purpose of explaining threads, ram, and cpu for doing what your doing (rendering) and not get overly technical:
threads = number of simultaneous separate calculation performed by the CPU to complete a render. the more threads the CPU has available to it the quicker a render can complete. If you watch a 3Delight render work on a multi core system you may see a segment of the render lingering in one spot trying to "render" a block of your image while other treads are speeding across the screen. There are a number of factors involved in the speed of a render and the default 3Delight settings are not always the best speeding things up. The size of the "boxes" that are being rendered by a thread are directly related to your "Bucket Size" in the rendering control panel. Things with transparencies (along with dozens of other surface combinations) generally take longer than things without. If your buckets are taking a long time to fill (now do you see why they are called buckets?) you can lower your bucket size.
If you use LuxRender (via Reality or LuxRenderDS for DS3 only) you can tell LuxRender how many threads to use directly on the interface, but in 3Delight (the default rendering engine used by Daz3D for Daz Studio that they do not own) you will need to modify the startup of DazStudio if you wish to use less than all your threads when you render. If you want the render to use all threads you don't need to change anything.
CPU = all calculations for 3Delight (and Daz Studio and LuxRender for that matter) happen in the CPU. The speed of the CPU is directly related to the speed of your render, slower CPU = slower render, faster CPU = well you get the idea. The threads are all being processed in the CPU when you render. The threads are feeding the CPU the data that needs to be calculated and the CPU is processing the data and telling the threads "this is the result for the calculations you requested for thread 0,1,2,3,4,5,7,.. and thread 6 is still being calculated because it's a very complex request with transparent hair, and bump map and a raytraced shadow over a displacement so it's going to still be a black square at the top of the screen still when the other 7 cores have pretty much finished their job."
RAM = think of RAM as your workspace, the more RAM you have the bigger the space is available to you, or the more you computer can hold on to for the CPU and feed it as needed. The CPU is constantly looking at RAM for information about your scene and pulling the information from it, the faster the RAM the faster it will get to the CPU and be processed. A big scene with a lot of textures and models needs to have that information handy and it needs to get to the CPU quickly. While the computer can use the Hard Drive to keep that information handy and give it to the CPU it is incredibly slow compared to having RAM do it, it's called paging and all computers have used it since forever but having enough RAM to render without resorting to paging is preferred. Daz Studio, 3Delight and LuxRender are using as much RAM as they need when they need it provided you are running the 64 bit versions of them, you don't need to do anything else to them to get them to do that. RAM itself does not speed things up the speed of the RAM assists in getting that information to the CPU quicker and the amount of RAM assists in having the computer not resort to paging to your Hard Drive and slowing things down to a crawl.
Privately I'm still on Windows XP, but at work, where my workstation was simultaneously part of a render farm (Maya),
I used the Windows 7 task manager to assign processor cores to specific tasks. If you are using a quad core, you can assign
your render to three cores, leaving the fourth core for another program like Photoshop. Whatever amount of RAM
that is not in use by DAZ Studio can then be used by the other program. That way, you can make the maximum out
of your computer set up, both CPU and RAM-wise.