How to Tell When Daz Studio is Using the GPU for Iray

Krzysztofa

I tried searching for this, but the forum search just returned every result that had the word "rendering" in it so... not terribly helpful. My question is simple: When I render a scene with Iray, how can I tell if its using GPU or CPU? Does DS give a clear indication? So far I've just been guessing based on whether a scene seemed like it was rendering quickly or not, but I'd like a more clear way of knowing.

I've tried watching the GPU usage in task manager > performance tab, but no matter what scene I render, from a large scene with many objects, to a scene with a single primitive, the GPU meter never pings above single digit percentage usage.

I know this is very nooby question but until recently I had never used Iray.

Richard Haseltine

The default Task Manager display doesn't show CUDA use. A quicj way to minitor is to go to the Perfomenace tab, select the GPU graphs, and chnage one of the graphs to CUDA (or Compute 0 if there is no CUDA) - that at least will show you how much work the GPU is doing.

Krzysztofa

Ah I see, thank you very much Richard! I didn't even know you could change out the charts like that in the performance tab.

EDIT: and to my surprise, many of my renders on my laptop actually are using the GPU! I thought the laptop was mostly using CPU since it always renders so slow, but I suppose a mobile GTX 970 card isn't going to be blazing fast. The GPU/CPU use on my large PC are more inline with what I expected.