Iray; Speeding up Animation Render, specifically the "load in"

Diaspora

So, I have an animation that I'm rendering where every frame takes about 17 seconds to render, a couple of characters, two genesis 8s and some rocks as a landscape.

My problem is, I measure it and it takes about six and a half seconds before the iray iterations start, which, across 1000 frames, adds up quite a lot.

If I understand correctly, it looks like DAZ Studio is loading in the geometry and materials data to the gpus every single frame? Is there any way to speed this process up?

If there's no software settings to affect, what hardware is bottlenecking that part of the process in case I think about upgrading? I have a multi-gpu setup that I've invested a lot into and I want to not have it bottlenecked if at all possible.

margrave

Daz Studio uses the Iray render engine, which is proprietary to NVIDIA. As I understand it, feeding geometry and texture data to Iray through its API isn't something they can optimize, since it's not their source code.

Diaspora

That's understandable, but in which case, what optimizations can be done on the user end?

margrave

As far as sending data to Iray goes, reduce texture size, simplify geometry, and use instances.

WendyLuvsCatz

it should render faster if a static scene just the camera moving as the geometry doesn't need to be updatec

Diaspora

margrave said:

 and use instances.

Great idea! Forgot that DAZ Studio does instances. 

Rodrij

Diaspora said:

So, I have an animation that I'm rendering where every frame takes about 17 seconds to render, a couple of characters, two genesis 8s and some rocks as a landscape.

My problem is, I measure it and it takes about six and a half seconds before the iray iterations start, which, across 1000 frames, adds up quite a lot.

If I understand correctly, it looks like DAZ Studio is loading in the geometry and materials data to the gpus every single frame? Is there any way to speed this process up?

If there's no software settings to affect, what hardware is bottlenecking that part of the process in case I think about upgrading? I have a multi-gpu setup that I've invested a lot into and I want to not have it bottlenecked if at all possible.

If you leave a render window open before doing the animatino rendering, asset loading times are reduced. The downside is it takes a little more VRAM. Also don't have more than one render window open because each open window takes up VRAM. You'll only need one.

What I do is a spot render in window mode in tool settings for spot render, leave the render window open, then do the animation.

I'm guessing when you leave the render window open, the assets are still loaded into memory so when you start the animation render the assets are already loaded.

Diaspora

Rodrij said:

The downside is it takes a little more VRAM. 

I do have plenty of that to spare, thank you for the tip, I'm gonna try that out soon. Cheers! 

Diaspora

Huh! That trick trims off about 2-3 seconds, which across an 800 frame batch render, really adds up! Thank you!

Diaspora

Been meaning to ask, what kind of hardware upgrade could I consider to further trim "load in" times, will faster ram help the situation at all? I already use an SSD.