How much GPU memory is enough?

lbartels

Hello,

Hopefully this is the right group to discuss this. My daily driver is a simple computer with a 1050ti GPU. Which, if you didn't know, has 4GB of memory.  It handles everything I do just fine, except rendering.

I know, it's not the fastest.. And I plan on upgrading. I have a 2070 sitting here, ready to go in, but before I do, I have to migrate my system to a larger case so it physically fits. The case is on the way. (new power supply too)

The 2070 has 8GB of memory. Obviously, the 2070 will perform much better than my current 1050ti. But I wonder, should I break open the piggy bank and get something even more powerful? With even more memory?

Maybe the better question would be, how can I tell if/when I'm running out of GPU memory?

So how much GPU memory is enough? Or can there ever be enough?

 

thanks in advance

Leana

It depends on what kind of scenes you plan to render. 8GB is not bad, but for big scenes with lots of textures you might need more. 

And the only way you can tell is that you try to render and Iray tells you it can't use the GPU.

PerttiA

Depends on what you put in the scene.

At the moment, 8GB's is about the minimum, about half of it is available for geometry and textures, which are the ones needing the most.
A 12GB 3060 would be a much better and one doesn't need to sell a kidney or rob a bank to get one.

If your scene is too big, it will drop to CPU (if allowed) and it takes 10-20+ times longer to render, if fallback to CPU is disabled, you get nothing (black render)

IceCrMn

Too much GPU VRAM is like too much money.

There's no such thing.

Yes, there is a "good enough" level and as PerttiA posted, the 12GB RTX 3060 is a great price to feature card. It has 12GB VRAM and is more affordable than the RTX cards with more VRAM.

It's the card I currently run. I've got no complaints about it's performance.

 

lbartels

Thank-you all.. 

You confirmed what I suspected. You're right the 12G 3060 sounds like the ticket.. I think I'll go that route. Probably bump system memory while I have the case open.

Hylas

I'm rendering with 8GB. It can usually handle a scene with two Genesis 8 figures at subD 4 and "stuff" (hair, clothes, scenery). I sometimes hit the limit though,12GB is definitely better.

jtbethel

Something I came across in a post here (can't remember where)

GPU memory will be affected very much by the amount of character morphs you have in your Library based on the character you are using. Also the amount of third party shape changing morphs.

As all of these are loaded wth the base character, for some reason it hits the GPU memory.

I had quite a few hundred G8F characters and various body morphs and I was getting a black screen on rendering very often. I moved a lot of character morphs from the "My Library\data\DAZ 3D\Genesis 8\Female\Morphs folder to new folder and not only does it vastly improve loading of G8F but also cured my black renders.

Also I have two very similar PC one for gaming and has an RTX 2080 Ti with 11 Gig memory, the Daz PC has two GTX 1080 Ti 11 gig each. The Daz PC renders much quicker than the gaming PC.

FSMCDesigns

jtbethel said:

Something I came across in a post here (can't remember where)

GPU memory will be affected very much by the amount of character morphs you have in your Library based on the character you are using. Also the amount of third party shape changing morphs.

As all of these are loaded wth the base character, for some reason it hits the GPU memory.

I had quite a few hundred G8F characters and various body morphs and I was getting a black screen on rendering very often. I moved a lot of character morphs from the "My Library\data\DAZ 3D\Genesis 8\Female\Morphs folder to new folder and not only does it vastly improve loading of G8F but also cured my black renders.

Also I have two very similar PC one for gaming and has an RTX 2080 Ti with 11 Gig memory, the Daz PC has two GTX 1080 Ti 11 gig each. The Daz PC renders much quicker than the gaming PC.

I don't experience this. I have a 2080ti and hundreds of characters and morphs and even 4 bloated libraries and they don't seem to affect anything having to do with rendering

PerttiA

FSMCDesigns said:

jtbethel said:

Something I came across in a post here (can't remember where)

GPU memory will be affected very much by the amount of character morphs you have in your Library based on the character you are using. Also the amount of third party shape changing morphs.

As all of these are loaded wth the base character, for some reason it hits the GPU memory.

I had quite a few hundred G8F characters and various body morphs and I was getting a black screen on rendering very often. I moved a lot of character morphs from the "My Library\data\DAZ 3D\Genesis 8\Female\Morphs folder to new folder and not only does it vastly improve loading of G8F but also cured my black renders.

Also I have two very similar PC one for gaming and has an RTX 2080 Ti with 11 Gig memory, the Daz PC has two GTX 1080 Ti 11 gig each. The Daz PC renders much quicker than the gaming PC.

I don't experience this. I have a 2080ti and hundreds of characters and morphs and even 4 bloated libraries and they don't seem to affect anything having to do with rendering

The only way I can think of, is if one was running out of RAM and the OS started using virtual memory to compensate. 

Richard Haseltine

PerttiA said:

FSMCDesigns said:

jtbethel said:

Something I came across in a post here (can't remember where)

GPU memory will be affected very much by the amount of character morphs you have in your Library based on the character you are using. Also the amount of third party shape changing morphs.

As all of these are loaded wth the base character, for some reason it hits the GPU memory.

I had quite a few hundred G8F characters and various body morphs and I was getting a black screen on rendering very often. I moved a lot of character morphs from the "My Library\data\DAZ 3D\Genesis 8\Female\Morphs folder to new folder and not only does it vastly improve loading of G8F but also cured my black renders.

Also I have two very similar PC one for gaming and has an RTX 2080 Ti with 11 Gig memory, the Daz PC has two GTX 1080 Ti 11 gig each. The Daz PC renders much quicker than the gaming PC.

I don't experience this. I have a 2080ti and hundreds of characters and morphs and even 4 bloated libraries and they don't seem to affect anything having to do with rendering

The only way I can think of, is if one was running out of RAM and the OS started using virtual memory to compensate. 

Yes, Iray gets the final shape - it doesn't know anything about the modifiers that took the model from base to the final shape.

michaelfenix

I have a 12 gig 3060 AND an 8 gig 2070 super and it still isn't enough for some scenes. 

PerttiA

michaelfenix said:

I have a 12 gig 3060 AND an 8 gig 2070 super and it still isn't enough for some scenes. 

As far as VRAM goes, you only have 12GB's at max. The 2070 will take part in rendering when the scene is small enough to fit in 8GB's of VRAM = rendering speed is faster, but having both GPU's in your system, does not increase the available amount of VRAM for Iray rendering. 

Arokaria

Hello.

This thead is interresting. In my log file I found some memory information about a small scene I test (two characters).

2023-01-25 12:09:24.768 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.3 IRAY rend info : CUDA device 0 (NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti): Allocated 48.162 MiB for frame buffer

2023-01-25 12:09:24.768 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.3 IRAY rend info : CUDA device 0 (NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti): Allocated 1.906 GiB of work space (2048k active samples in 0.000s)

 

I suppose that the memory used by my scene is "1.906 GiB of work space" to compare with the memory of my card : 11 GiB. Is it correct ?

And another question : is there a post, a thead, a tuto where the contain of log file is explained ?

Thank you for the answers. Regards.

 

PerttiA

No, the working space is something needed by the process.

Use GPU-Z to see how much RAM and VRAM are used https://www.techpowerup.com/gpuz/