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...I still have all the installers/.zips from 1.8 through the 4.12 betat version I am currently using archived. Stopped updating when I learned the next 4.12 general release had some annoying bugs. For a Beta I am very surprised at how stable it's been
I'm not sure why the discussion was dragged out in the first place, but I appreciate you and Richard for killing even the potential for speculation.
I probably do have many of the previous versions since I am a digital horder. Thankfully in the physical world I can be ruthless version of a declutterer ...errrr. I have files dating back to when I started selling windows 2.0 systems and dos 3.
Just think tomorrow, once the birthday princess has had her day you send back to the salt mines to keep you in those dapper hats
Because this a forum. What else would we do with our time if not kvetch over things that have not happened yet. You MUST agree; "LONG LIVE DISSENT !!!"
Thanks for taking a little time out to add this (and Happy Birthday to your wife).
As you will see when you have the time to really read through this thread, your announcement prompted more questions and we are left with speculation because there are no answers forthcoming. So perhaps (pretty please) a little basic information might help stem the tide of speculation? OK, so DAZ Studio will rmain free (nice to know). The other hot-button issues seem to be the perennial wish-list items:
I'm sure there are other I have missed. One that springs to mind is the request for multiple collision surfaces. For example, mesh smoothing only allows one, so a dress can't detect the figure and any undergarment at the same time.
I wouldn't have any problem paying the same as Poser for a DAZ3D native M1 version that used Metal directly.
Why? Metal doesn't affect the performance of useful applications.
The main thing I want is faster figure load times, but would also like to see improvements to IK and maybe a Linux version so I can finally dump Windows.
You have not made a tests with Apple M1 hardware, apparently.
From my own experiments I see 5 to 50 times speed increase in 3D graphics applications on MacBook Pro 13 inches with Apple M1 hardware
while comparing with older Macs, even with Nvidia graphics card.
I know, that iray does not support Apple M1 natively yet, but hopefully Apple will find another solution.
Right now I am amazed by Apple M1 performance and believe me I have started my journey with the computers
like mainframes that were using paper tape as a program and data input, Timex TS1000 with 8 bit CPU and 2 KB RAM
and continue with all possible hardware including the latest ones.
Ho was it dragged out? I asked got an answer from someone that had the knowledge to answer and I walked away. And just for the record, I asked because it is not uncommon for companies to start charging for a service or program after a major rework or update. It may not have been an important question in your mind but it was in mine and several others.
Metal is the graphics language used on the M series of Apple processors. Metal is to Apple as iRay is to NVIDIA. There are several graphics libraries available that support both Metal and various others, making transportability of code between computers easy.
Do you mean CUDA to nVidia?
Metal is Apple's variation of DirectX and Vulkan. Iray is not the same kind of library/software. DAZ Studio uses OpenGL for real-time rendering on both Microsoft and Apple platforms. DirectX is only used for audio processing on the windows platform so there is no API advantage of DirectX on windows versus Metal on mac. Metal, DirectX, and Vulkan aren't really beneficial to improving DAZ Studio performance because the software is not graphics intensive like a shooting or driving game.
Metal could be used for real-time rendering to replace OpenGL but then DAZ would have to write and maintain code for OpenGL (or DirectX) and Metal. Before they even start that DAZ 3D would have to do analysis to determine if the performance gains in Metal are sufficient for them over the ease of maintaining OpenGL compatibility.
Metal, Vulkan, and DirectX seem like similar APIs because they began from the same root API but porting your source code between the API is a very expensive task in time and money. In addition, once they ported the code to the Metal API, they would have to maintain Metal as a separate API.
Yes, please, definitely a native Linux version. I have been running Pop_OS for a number of years now and having to try and use VM's with limited video support for visual tools is such a pain.
It is possible to create a Metal-based rendering engine, though, where GPUs could be used both by Apple and Windows machines, but that means looking at still another texturing system; while it has a few nice ray-tracing features (like motion blur).
It would mean that people with any kind of GPU would see accelerated ray tracing, not just INvidia GPUs. Not sure if would be worth it, or how much better or faster (if either) than beefing up Filament support.
https://developer.apple.com/metal/
It might be something a 3rd party might look at developing once D|S 5 is released and stable, but I don't think it would be something high on a feature list by DAZ for quite some time, if ever, and understandably so.
-- Walt Sterdan
That would be Filament using Metal as it's backend on Apple products because iRay would work on modern Apple products but can't when nVidia video card hardware is absent on modern Apple hardware that cannot be upgraded to use new nVidia hardware. You have to consider what would nVidia's motive be in porting their free software solution to Apple hardware that they only wrote in order to sell nVidia hardware but can't sell nVidia hardware on Apple platforms because those platforms don't include nVidia hardware or the capability to upgrade to use nVidia hardware. If they can't earn their bread on Apple platforms they shouldn't exert one iota of effort on Apple platforms. Customers that want to use nVidia software should choose platforms that nVidia software supports. One shouldn't hold their breath expecting Apple & nVidia to make up. Both know their core customers aren't going to dump one for the other because of the impass between Apple & nVidia. If you have enough money to burn you can buy single use case hardware for both Apple & nVidia but you'll have at least 2 computers to do that.
Just to clarify, iRay does work without issue on machines without iRay GPUs, just very slowly compared to machines with iRay GPUs... probably about as fast as those NVidia machines that are occasionally forced to drop back to CPU rendering due to lack of sufficioent VRAM.
-- Walt Sterdan
I started out rendering on a 3.5ghz i5. Most of the scenes I did took at least 12 hours to render. Then I switched to a dedicated render PC with a 970 GPU. The render times dropped to just over an hour!
Cheers,
Alex.
Feel free to change my "very slowly" to "occasionally very, very, very slowly".
-- Walt Sterdan
Yeah... In general the difference is rendering several images during the evening, one render taking usually some 15-30 minutes (on my 2070 Super) or rendering on CPU one image over night, only to find that you forgot/overlooked something and do it again the next night.
Here is some nostalgia for everyone, from the webarchive in 2009, 2010, 2011 of Daz Studio 2, 3 and 4..
For Daz Studio 3 there was Daz Studio 3 and Daz Studio 3 Advanced.. With Daz Studio 4 there was Daz Studio 4, Daz Studio 4 Advanced and Daz Studio 4 Pro.. It is amazing how far we have come in that time, seems just like yesterday but it is nearly 12 years since Daz Studio 2..
Daz Studio 2.x refused to run on my machine(s). I kept using Poser until DS 4.7 I think it was (whatever the version number right before Iray was added). Even that was years ago now.
I never even used Studio until Genesis 2 came out. Damn that seems like a lifetime ago!
Just like yesterday indeed... getting misty-eyed and all...
...while Iray rendering on the CPU can be glacial depending on the scene, nothing held a candle for slowness to Reality/Lux which was "geologic" in comparison. It could take up to a couple days to have a scene that was relatively clear of graininess and fireflies, which was rough on the CPU as this was before water cooled systems for CPUs. The one benefit was at least you didn't need to keep the Daz programme open once the scene was sent to the render engine which saved on memory/system resources and you could also run the process in background.
Personally I never want to go back to CPU mode on Iray. after rendering with a 12 GB GPU that has over 3000 cores. Not as fast as the RTX cards but still a major improvement.
You carry memory of DAZ Studio .
DAZ should give you A Good Coupon as Reward .
...first started with Aiko 3 and Vicky 4, seems like several lifetimes.
For those who have been here since the Zygote days, probably more like an eternity.
I still have my copy of the very first DS public beta (0.9.something) on a backup drive. And yes, that was looong ago ;)