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What does Number of Texture Units mean?

sabastinasabastina Posts: 27
in Technical Help (nuts n bolts)

When I examined Current Hardware Features from my Edit>Preferences menu, I noticed that under the Maximum Number of Lights, it says Number of Textures: 8
What does this mean?
Surely it can't possibly mean that I can only use 8 textures in my renders!?!

Thank you for any help in understanding this, I'm trying to familiarize myself with the program a bit.

Also, I don't have an NVIDIA card, I have AMD, and don't plan to every get an NVIDIA card.  Is this going to make my work in Daz Studio Pro not look very good?  What exactly does this NVIDIA Iray do that my AMD can not?

Thanks again!

Comments

  • GordigGordig Posts: 10,049

    Iray utilizes the CUDA cores in Nvidia cards to speed up your renders. There’s no difference in quality between an Iray render done on an Nvidia card versus an AMD one. 

  • fixmypcmikefixmypcmike Posts: 19,583
    Gordig said:

    Iray utilizes the CUDA cores in Nvidia cards to speed up your renders. There’s no difference in quality between an Iray render done on an Nvidia card versus an AMD one. 

    That is, if you don't have an Nvidia card then Iray will use the CPU to render.

  • sabastinasabastina Posts: 27

    Ah, ok.  I was worried about that, but if it's only speed, then I'll live with it.

    Thanks very much guys.

  • SpottedKittySpottedKitty Posts: 7,232
    edited May 2020

    Keep in mind that, since a non-GPU render takes a lot longer, you're likely to run out of the default time limit of 2 hours to get a render that compares with a GPU one. Easily fixed; go to the Render Settings pane, select Progressive Rendering, and adjust the Max Time value. It's measured in seconds, so the 2 hour default is 7,200 seconds.

    Note that if you set this to zero, the render will ignore the time limit and keep going until it hits one of the other stop conditions in the Progressive Rendering sub-tab (or until you stop it manually).

    Post edited by SpottedKitty on
  • sabastinasabastina Posts: 27
    SpottedKitty said:

    Keep in mind that, since a non-GPU render takes a lot longer, you're likely to run out of the default time limit of 2 hours to get a render that compares with a GPU one. Easily fixed; go to the Render Settings pane, select Progressive Rendering, and adjust the Max Time value. It's measured in seconds, so the 2 hour default is 7,200 seconds.

    Note that if you set this to zero, the render will ignore the time limit and keep going until it hits one of the other stop conditions in the Progressive Rendering sub-tab (or until you stop it manually).

    Thanks for taking the time to mention this becasue I had no idea that renders would stop at all.

  • DrunkMonkeyProductionsDrunkMonkeyProductions Posts: 979

    If you scroll down a bit in that window, it explains exactly what each item means.

    Here's what it says

    Number of Texture Units:
    The maximum number of texture units that can be active on the card. This is the maximum number of images that can be used when drawing a single material. For example, a texture map would require a unit, a transparency map would require a unit, a shadow map would require a unit, and a bump map would require a unit - totalling 4 texture units - if your card supports less than this number, than some of these maps will not be applied in the interactive view, or hardware renders.

    Translation: If you have a material that has more than 8 maps(in your case), it'll just ignore them in the Viewport.

    It has nothing to do with rendering other than if using OpenGL render.

     

     

  • sabastinasabastina Posts: 27
    DrunkMonkeyProductions said:

    If you scroll down a bit in that window, it explains exactly what each item means.

    Here's what it says

    Number of Texture Units:
    The maximum number of texture units that can be active on the card. This is the maximum number of images that can be used when drawing a single material. For example, a texture map would require a unit, a transparency map would require a unit, a shadow map would require a unit, and a bump map would require a unit - totalling 4 texture units - if your card supports less than this number, than some of these maps will not be applied in the interactive view, or hardware renders.

    Translation: If you have a material that has more than 8 maps(in your case), it'll just ignore them in the Viewport.

    It has nothing to do with rendering other than if using OpenGL render.

     

     

    Thank you very much for the information!

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