(Solved) IRay Image Series Goes to CPU Rendering

SquarePeg3D

Hi, everyone! I'm experiencing a rather peculiar problem that I've never experienced before:

First, I'd like to point out I have TWO rendering rigs. One is a Windows 7 Home, AMD FX-8350 CPU, 32GB of RAM, and 2x 980 GTX's. The other is a Windows 7 Professional, Intel i7 CPU, 64GB of RAM, and 2x 980 GTX's. For anyone unfamiliar, the 980's each have 4GB of VRAM. The rig that is giving me problems is the AMD rig. I'm using Daz 4.9 on each rig, and each one is fully updated in regards to GPU drivers and Windows Updates.

The specific issue I'm having is that I'm rendering an image series on each rig (different camera angles of the same scene). There are three scenes, and each one of them renders flawlessly on the Intel rig. The AMD rig however will render the first frame without error, but as soon as it moves to the second frame it will cease any GPU rendering and move immediately to CPU rendering, which is agonizingly slow and nullifies the whole point of having two nice and shiny GPU's to render with. I would also like to point out that the scene in question was created on the AMD rig, meaning there is no real chance (in my mind) that there are file inconsistencies between the two rigs.

I will point out that I only recently upgraded to Daz 4.9 from Daz 4.8, and it was after this upgrade that I experienced these issues. Daz 4.7 and 4.8 both rendered flawlessly with my GPU's, and I'm willing to put money on the notion that if I downgraded back to 4.8 my GPU's would work flawlessly again. I do NOT think this is a hardware issue, or that if it is the VRAM cache is not being purged before the next frame.

Even if you don't have an answer for me, at the very least if you've had this issue please post a reply. The worst feeling is thinking you're all alone in a problem like this. Thanks, everyone. =D

SquarePeg3D

For anyone furiously trying to help solve my particular issue but has remained stoicly silent, I just thought I would list other things that I have tried:

1. Uninstalling and reinstalling DAZ. I made sure to use a 3rd party uninstallation program that also scans the registry for residual items.

2. Did further searches for stable Nvidia drivers and found a post that recommended 373.06. This did not work.

3. Removed items individually from the scene and ran the render. Only worked when I removed everything (except some basic planes) from the scene.

4. Turned on/off Optix Prime Acceleration.

5. Reset Iray Render Settings to Default.

Some personal observations I've made:

As mentioned in the original post, my Intel PC renders an image series just fine. BOTH of my rigs will render still image batches just fine using this plugin (https://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/batch-renderer-for-daz-studio/110993). The log file shows that I am running out of VRAM on my AMD PC after the first frame is rendered - this leads me to believe that Daz isn't purging the VRAM for each frame, whereas I've noticed that my Intel PC DOES (or at least it still has to "prepare" each frame and shows the resources that frame is using).

Operating on this concept, does anybody have ideas as to how I could go about ensuring the VRAM purged frame-to-frame for an Image Series render? I don't care if I have to buy a 3rd party plugin for Daz. Thanks, again. =D

SquarePeg3D

I managed to find a workaround to the issue.

It was in fact either my graphics cards, Daz, or some other situation that was causing my 980's to hold onto the memory without releasing it. I noticed after an individual render had finished or was canceled, the memory was immediately and completely purged successfully. As such, I used a program called Autohotkey - a program that with each use becomes closer to being my new god - to create a script that would render each frame of a series as a single render session, allow the memory to purge, then automatically start the next render in the series.

I ran a field test today while I worked at my 9-5 job, and the script flawlessly rendered 29 frames which was the exact amount I had calculated that it should have rendered in that time.

For anyone that isn't afraid of learning BASIC programming/hotkey creation, I can firmly and irrefutably recommend Autohotkey. I've used this program to create a script to automatically bypass minor errors while I was away, batch process 100's (if not thousands by this point) of images that used uniform post work saving me from countless man-hours of editing, and now I have a script that so far has completely solved the memory issue I - and from what I see on the forums, MANY other people - was encountering.

Toonces

I may have to check it out. I vaguely remember using autohotkey (or something similar) back in the days when i used to multi-box online games.

When I ran into the dropping-to-cpu-while-animating-frame-2 issue, I was able to resolve it by disabling optix. However since the upgrade to latest version of daz, I haven't encountered the issue again, and I've been able to use optix.