Any settings to keep the rendering from freezing when the scene is too strong for my PC?
statistx_42556c1853
Posts: 89
I have a lower tier PC, which makes rendering a pain mostly, but I can deal with slow.
What I can't deal with is my PC completely freezing and me having to hardreset. The problem is, that I never know which scenes are too complex and cause a freeze.
With freeze I mean that my mouse doesn't even move anymore, so I can't reach the cancel render button. (And I don't think there is a panic button keybind that instantly cancels?)
I am not asking on how to lower scene complexity, I know about those tips, but I don't want to mess around with most of those when it may not be necessary, so my question is, are there any settings I can use to prevent freezing? I turned off CPU fallback and CPU render (since my CPU is probably the weakest part of my PC) and that seems to help a bit, but still causes some scenes to freeze my PC.
So any other settings I can use (maybe lowering CPU core usage and turning CPU on again?) to prevent freezes? I am fine with slow rendering, I can keep my PC running over night, but I just don't want to hardreset.
My main specs are (and again, I know it's not ideal, but those are the cards I've been dealt)
Win 10, 12 GB Ram, Nvidia GTX1060 with 6GB and a Xeon CPU which is performancewise around an i3
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Comments
Buy more RAM, 12GB is not enough to keep W10 from using the disk as an extension for RAM
And that freezes the whole PC? Buying anything is not an option, so no way to do anything in the program?
As soon as the computer is using more that 10 GB of your RAM it will start using the swap file on the disc. It has nothing to do with Studio other than you have a lot in the scene that is using up that RAM. The only way to stop the swap file usage is to lower the total RAM being used by the computer. Try stopping some background programs that you don't need that are using RAM. The only other way is to keep your scenes low in content and therefore low in RAM use.
So basically there are no safety settings that prevent my issue.
I am looking into upgrading RAM now, but it's difficult cause I have a weird PC configuration that uses 6 out of 12 slots with 2GB each and I'm trying to figure out a budget way of getting more RAM in the most sensical way. (Pricewise it seems that 4x4GB or 2x8GB or 8x2GB might be viable, though I also found some 4GB ones with a price that would make it possible to go 6x4GB)
Try this scanner which will tell you what updates are available for your machine. I use it when I need to.
https://uk.crucial.com/store/systemscanner
Thanks, already found it beforehand, but my machine isn't on their list of compatible stuff. I only now know that I have those 6 slots used, cause it can scan, but not tell me what is compatible.
If you don't have the manual, what is the brand/type of the machine and/or do you know the name/type of the motherboard?
For huge scenes try using Canvas in Daz Studio. There's a bunch of Tutorials on Youtube.
Your motherboard info might show up in your BIOs setting, or you can use Speccy or maybe CPU-Z. When you find the motherboard info google it or go to the manufacture website for the board PDF manual.
I suggest when you find you're board info. Buy 1 8GB at a time until all your Ram is replaced with 8 GB chips. That's what I did. My chips cost me between $24 and $49 per chip (depending on sales at the time).
Oh one more thing. Since you're computer is struggling. Try using Genesis 3 or maybe even Genesis 2 characters instead of Genesis 8. Personally I'm not a fan of Genesis 8 because it can sometimes bog down even the best PC's out there if you have multiple of them in one scene with clothes, enviornment and other props.
If you're using Iray to render, you could try reducing the 'CPU Load Limit' advanced iray option on the 'Render Settings' tab to be at least one less than the number of CPU cores might help. It won't fix RAM problems but it would leave 1 CPU core for other activities and perhaps stop the PC freezing.
what works in combo, 90% (not 100%) of the time:
1) 32GB or more of RAM.
2) 8 core or more CPU
3) Render Settings - NVIDIA Iray - General : CPU Load Limit (will be set at the number of core threads you have on your CPU so decrease it to 2/3rds or 1/2 and restart DAZ Studio) --- and then & Check CPU Thread Affinity too.
I know that situation had it myself. the problem is not enough ram I once loaded a scene which hug up everything so much that I had to wait literally 1 hour just to cancel rendering
there are no settings to fix that you need more ram or at least an SSD drive to keep your windows swap file (if you are using old style HDD rather than SSD already)
CPU and GPU have no effect on this issue.
maybe you can try to plug few USB drives and set windows to use them as an extra swap space.
When DAZ Studio exits and then runs in the background a long time you can start DAZ Studio again, it will fail to start, but it does cause the hidden running DAZ Studio to exit when you do that. (I know it's not running out of RAM or Video RAM like you are talking about but it's a frequent problem too).
"maybe you can try to plug few USB drives and set windows to use them as an extra swap space."
OY VEY!!
DON'T DO THAT! THAT'S GOING TO SLOW YOUR COMPUTER DOWN EVEN MORE!
You're better off moving all you're Runtime files to USB 3 and using the free space on your PC for the actual Swap File Space.
Also have you even looked at Canvas? Also have you even looked at Scene Optimizer?
Here is a suggestion: When I was rendering on a potato I rendered parts of the scene seperately and then combined them together in photoshop. So instead of rendering the character and the background and the lights. Render the character with the lights first. Background second and photoshop them together. Not ideal, but it helped me.
I bought a new PC.
Now I got 16 GB RAM and a better CPU. Graphic card is the same, but i did a testrender of a scene that froze before and I can even watch a youtube video, copy files worth 20 minutes workduration from one HDD to a different one AND it's still like 5 times faster than the fastest my old setup has been.
Unless you are doing close-ups there's no real reason to have big texture maps on every character and running out of VRAM. I use this script and it works like a dream.