Nvidia RTX 3090 optimization discussion
RexRed
Posts: 1,323
Just got a Nvidia RTX 3090 from UPS about an hour ago. Newegg had one with a power supply bundled with it.
I did not need the power supply but since quantities are so scarce I bought it. A minute after I bought mine it was out of stock.
I figured it was better to get something for the extra money than just pay a scalper and get nothing but the card.
I got the Gigabyte Eagle OC brand.
Anyone else testing theirs out with Daz? Any thoughts or tips on how to get the most out of this cred?
I am not sure if this is going to be a step up cuda core wise from 2 1080ti's but it will be good on the video ram size.
My textures were being compressed like heck due to the video ram ceiling on almost every scene I was creating.
I am planning on adding one more when it becomes available and running them in NVlink.
Thanks for any input here... I am sort of new at this stuff and I learn a huge amount from this forum. :)
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There have been one or two tests posted to the benchmark thread, I think https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/341041/daz-studio-iray-rendering-hardware-benchmarking#latest
I turned off my CPU from aiding the render and shut off the second 1080ti it would not join in anyway the scene I picked to render was shutting down Daz because it was too big before this card.
This render came in at about 17.8 gb of GPU memory
Getting 47 degree temps with fans on high.
This thread as it is noted in the URL is a "discussion" on the 3090...
I am searching for the answers to not a single question but a myriad of parameter settings.
That is what a discussion is.
That means that as I and others continue to test this new tech out we may post more of our observations here
Some things require a progression of ideas rather than a single answer and a "solved" status.
This discussion is not solved until everyone relevant has been able to add their own thoughts as challenges arise.
What is the main focus of this thread? I would say "3090 optimization".
What are you doing to optimize the performance of your 3090?
I am at iteration 18 in IRAY and it has been 45 minutes.
I am rendering this image at 13500 x 11462 pixel resolution.
My situation and application is possibly different than others and this is why I seek my own personalized resolutions to various issues.
Your comments on this subject are welcome Daz peeps!
What are you doing to optimize your new card in the Windows 10 OS?
Currently 1 hour and 17 minutes @ iteration 31.
It has been 6 hours and 19 minutes and I am only at 159 iterations.
As stated before, it is a very large piece with a ton of geometry.
Not only is there a ton of geometry but I utilize fog/haze, sunspots and flairs...
The image looks quite pixilated still and I suspect it will need another 6+ hours to finish rendering.
I may have done a few errors before I rendered this;
first, I updated my Nvidia studio driver and did not restart my PC after.
Second, I unchecked CUDA core for the 1080ti and my GPU for phororeal and interactive
and I did not restart Daz before my render. Windows is sluggish and
it is not very responsive trying to use this PC while it is rendering.
I am hoping those are the reasons why. Normally my PC works fine during renders.
Allow CPU fallback is still checked and CPU Thread Affinity is checked
and CPU load is set at 12 threads even though I have 24 threads.
I should perhaps uncheck those and restart everything when this render is done.
I do still have the 1080ti active in my PC but it is not very useful other than to run my 3 monitors
while my 4th main monitor is plugged into the 3090.
I can't wait to try another 3090 in NVlink mode in this machine.
As I mentioned this scene is currently utilizing 17.7 GB of the GPU memory
and the medium threshold for texture compression is at 512 and the high threshold is at 1024...
I am wondering if the high threshold is limiting my 4k textures?
Would raising this upper threshold balloon that number up way over 24 GB of GPU memory?
It seems likely but I am not sure I have never tried testing this before...
It seems that Daz would automatically raise the threshold of the textures if the memory was available. Is that assumption correct?
Love to you all and thanks for any thoughts on this.
You do not have to own a 3090 to comment here.
Best to you all and Happy Thanksgiving (Indigenous People's Day)!!!
Congrats on your new 3090!
How much system RAM do you have? I would think a scene that pulls 17.7 GB VRAM with a lot of geometry would need maybe 40 GB RAM or more to set up. You mention your PC is sluggish while rendering--might be that your RAM is close to maxxed out and slows everything else down. I would also suggest disabling CPU fallback--with 24 GB VRAM you should not need CPU and using the CPU to render alongside your 3090 may actually slow down the renders since the 3090 is orders of magnitude faster than your CPU. You could also try running your med/high texture compression thresholds at 2048 and 4096 since you are using 4k textures.
One other note if you are thinking of adding a 2nd 3090 later--I have seen posts that state that 3rd party 3090 cards may have their NVLink ports at different locations, so it may be necessary to get the same model 3090 for the second card to avoid the possibility that the NVLink connector won't fit.
I think it will probably be a number of years until I could contribute to this thread seeing as I'm still on a gtx 970 LOL.
Well, probably too late, but the issue is the CPU being enabled for rendering alongside the GPU.
Hey Jbdiminnie, I have 128GB of system RAM but my computer will only recognize 96GB of it (or so it says).
I am not skilled enough about setting the memory parameters yet to figure out how to get my processor to recognize it all yet.
Hey Kaotkbliss, there are a lot of things I don't have because I sunk all of my "credit" into this rig. I guess I am a full-time 3D artist now. Some day I hope it will pay off.
Sevrin, you are 100% correct, it was the CPU fallback being enabled (and possible not restarting after driver update) and now I can use my PC for just about anything except gaming (which I have not tried) while I am rendering.
It can still take a long time rendering certain scenes when I use mist, rain, water, godrays with volumes or giant landscapes with tons of instances.
But it is like night and day when building scenes, I still have to switch to texture shaded mode to move things around still but switching back to Iray is about half or less of the time.
I can also build bigger scenes with more stuff in it and I suspect my textures are less compressed.
Daz Studio still tires to keep the scene down to a minimum so both of my cards 1080ti and 3090 both render.
I will say this to developers, it is really nice when their products have some sort of a preview in texture shaded mode considering that many tweaks need to be done there rather than Iray.
Especially when trying to change the horizontal or vertical tiling of textures.
Other than my system RAM problem everything seem to be working fine out of the box.
I should probably try using the aux viewport more (I usually have it shut off) but I have not yet learned how to utilize and fine tune that to be useful yet.
I thought it would require a lot of tweaking but I am ready for a second card as soon and I get this one paid off.
Two of these cards would cut some of my big renders down considerably.
My first render (see image) took 23 hours to render, Reshade is a hog!... :)
I have to render it again, I accidentally turned my transparency or did something to you can see the square transparency it is not completely invisible.
It was not like that in the previous render on my old cards and the old version of Iray/ Daz Studio.
It was probably me clicking on it and moving it by accident. I need to figure that out.
23 hours gone...
In Search Of Time
Good to hear disabling CPU fallback sorted the sluggishness issue. 96GB RAM should be more than enough for a scene requiring 17-18 GB VRAM. Based on Iray benchmarks I have seen you may want to run a second 3090 without the NVLink (unless you are really going to need 48 GB of VRAM?). Based on the benchmarks you will see about an 80-90% speed improvement from a 3090 alone. Regarding your question about a 3090 being a step up CUDA core wise from a 1080Ti, it is a major upgrade. Please bear in mind you cannot directly compare CUDA counts from the Pascal card to the new Ampere cards because the 3090 runs two iterations per CUDA cycle, effectively doubling the amount of effective CUDA cores used compared to Pascal/Turing cards. The benchmarks I have seen with the Daz Studio 3.14 version shows the 3090 to be 4.5x faster than a 1080Ti (so probably 2.5x faster than two 1080Ti's). Also as I am sure you are aware, please double check your power supply if you are going for a second 3090, since a single card can pull up to 400 W during rendering (I would think you would want at least a 1300 W power supply to safely run two 3090's and the rest of your system). I have seen a claim of a user running Iray renders with an overclocked 3090 (boost clock running at 2 GHz) and seeing 450-500 W power draw (their conclusion was that Ampere cards don't overclock very well and the performance increase in Iray was not worth the trouble).
Hey Jbdiminnie! I may not really need more video ram than 24 GB I have not seen even my biggest scenes hit that level yet but I am sure I will find one eventually.
I also have not experimented with setting up the 1080 texture compression upper threshold. I need to learn more about that.
In my mind it seems if the textures are being compressed then my scnese are not really using 4k textures, technically.
If I do need more GPU it is not that big of a task to turn SLI on. I am running a Rosewill 1600W Modular Gaming Power Supply, HERCULES-1600S Continuous @ 50 Degree C, 80 PLUS GOLD Certified.
I think that will be enough to run 2 x 3090s. That is very interesting what you said about leaving it in non NVLINK mode. That is definitely great info!
And I did not know that the 3090 could do two iterations in a single CUDA cycle. I think I am actually getting faster renders without the 1080ti in the mix.
Some of my really big renders cause Daz to exit and if I turn off the 1080ti it renders fine with the 3090 alone. I don't think they like running together.
Is it possible the 1080ti is slowing down the 3090?
I will do some tests on it and find out eventually.
It is working flawlessly so far other than not liking certain scenes with the 1080ti.
Your power supply should be fine for running two 3090's. There is a benchmark running a 3090 + 1080Ti in the benchmark threads (I asked someone to run that for me since I have a GTX Titan X Pascal which is functionally equivalent to a 1080Ti and I want to upgrade next year to a 3090 so I was curious if it was worthwhile to keep the old card or not) and the benchmark performance was increased by 15% versus a 3090 alone. However, if your scenes are requiring a lot of ray tracing in the render (because of fog, mist, etc) the 1080Ti is not really well equipped to handle that, while the 3090 with its ray tracing and tensor cores is ideal. In cases like this, the 1080Ti may actually hold back the 3090 and you may be better served to render with the 3090 alone and save the ~200W of energy waste from the 1080Ti. The benchmark scene isn't really optimized to account for ray tracing since it is designed to be run by a wide variety of cards for relative comparisons.
Jbdiminnie. Well, these graphics card comparisons seem like a bowl of soup sometimes, there are so many factors at play here.
That is again, a lot of very specific information that you have supplied here, and again, I am very grateful for your doing the legwork to obtain and share it.
The 1080ti does seem to excel and compliment the 3090 where there is no fog, underwater, transparencies, particle fields etc just a couple models some textures and basic lights.
Then it whizzes through the scene render.
I don't know how I ever got by with it and that seems quite ludicrous considering the 1080ti is really a great card. I have three of them and one of them cost me $1000.00
The other two cost around $500.00 each about 6 months ago refurbished on Amazon.
Now I doubt I could get $500 for two of them on EBay.
I have unchecked the 1080ti in Daz (I did not restart Daz)
The 1080ti is still showing usage of 5.9GB of dedicated GPU memory (that is a lot) but only 2% "utilization" and the cuda cores are showing 0% utilization.
What is using half of its memory? Windows? My monitors? It is running at 44C which seems sort of high also considering it should not be rendering. No 3D activity either.
I do have three monitors plugged into the 1080ti and one (my main monitor) plugged into the 3090...
I hear you about the cost of video cards--I bought my Titan X (Pascal) literally a week before the 1080Ti was announced by NVidia--if I had waited I could have had essentially the same performance card for $400 less. That was back in the halcyon day of yore when new video cards didn't sell out 1 minute after they launched.
Regarding your GPU memory, my thought is that if your 1080Ti is still showing 6 GB VRAM usage after unchecking it in render options is that there is probably some residual scene information still bouncing around in the card's memory, especially if you were running test renders and didn't save them or using the Iray preview mode in your viewport. Restarting Daz Studio should clear that out. Also, with versions 4.12 and 4.14 of DS non-RTX cards have additional code sent to them to enable certain ray tracing emulations that take up additional VRAM on the cards (I found when I updated from 4.12 to 4.14 that certain scenes that used to fit on my Titan X were dropping to CPU because my VRAM was full; however I also found that renders on the GPU were improved by about 10% in speed). All the more reason to consider upgrading Pascal cards to the new Ampere cards once the supply/availability situation starts to normalize.