MAX performance out of my hardware

Theaumoix

Hi Peeps,

Im hoping to get an answer from an expert(ish) renderer in here about a burning question ive been struggling with: How can I get the best performance out of my hardware?

Obviously, what im after most of all is some timewise improvement to the standard performance of my rig. Especially since I got into DAZ about a month ago and I'm going through the proces of relentlessly producing failed and aborted renders which turned out too light, too dark, completely black or completely white, awefully grainy or hidiously pixelated renders. And when I set the scene to my "best guess settings" for yet another try, I do a last check by running a low resolution version resulting in a tiny tiny image which might conceal a small but annoying flaw in the render before I start an overnight operation for the real thing. Unfortunately most of the times, it's only to find my +5hr waiting time was in vain when I discover that some prop or piece of clothing turns out to be intersecting another or something like that. I think the amount of discarded renders outnumbers the succesful ones by about 100 to 1 but hey, thats all part of becoming "experienced" right?

I have always been a desktop system kinda guy but i've been forced to revert to a laptop these days.. So here's my rig:

Intel Core i7-4700MQ CPU @2.40GHz - 8 GB RAM (will be doubled a.s.a.p.) - 256 GB SSD (holds Windows 10 OS and used for DS + content files) - 1 TB HDD (for additional warez) - Nvidia GeForce GTX 765M (768 pipes @ 850 MHz, 2GB GDDR5, 128 Bit @ 4000 MHz)

So, from what I read in threads about hardware performance, I've come to believe that the RAM will help me speed things up... Is that a correct interpretation?

Secondly, I've assumed that my graphics card shoud to all the work on the renders. My best guess is that this is what I would like to optimize if possible....I've heard about CUDA cores (of which I know nothing at all) so I searched the specs to my GPU and found this info on http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GTX-765M.92907.0.html

"The GK106 Kepler core offers five shader blocks, called SMX, that are clocked at the same speed as the central core. In the GTX 765M, four blocks are active for a total of 768 CUDA cores."

Aside from making sure I have the latest drivers, and sniffing around in what i could find on the Nvidia setup menu on my system (with little useful result), I have virtually no idea what I should be doing/changing/looking for. So I guess the best way to formulate my question is:

Is my hardware at all sufficient to be used effectively with DS? And if so, can anyone that knows of any useful tricks and tips have a look at my gear and hopefully provide some advise on what to do to crank up the output in terms of render quality/ proces time/ general performance?

I would be very grateful for any and all of your attempts to help me out!

Many thanks in advance,

Cheers peeps,

Thomas

evilded777

What render engine are we talking here? I'm guessing Iray?

RAM is not really going to help if that's the case.  Iray is GPU accelerated, its always going to be on the slow side when rendering via CPU.  So... the 2GB VRAM is most likely where you are having an issue: you run up against that cap and Iray starts using the CPU instead of the GPU.