Question for the computer hardware Whiz Kids
What I have now: 5yr old laptop with an i3Core processor, 6GB of RAM and an integrated Intel(i believe) graphics card.
What I just ordered: New Desktop with an i7(3.3GHz) 6 core processor, 8GB of RAM(expandable to 32) and a Nvidia GTX 960 4GB memory card.
Currently, Daz can be sluggish when I'm working setting up scenes, navigating within the scene, LOOOONG render times if it renders at all without freezing up. What kind of realistic improvement can I expect with this new system? As far as in screen navigating, picture quality and render times.
Any thoughts would be appreciated!
Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2025 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
From what I've seen one other claim their render times were 1/3 to 1/4 their old times and that was with a slightly better old nVidia card than an old Intel integrated graphics cards.
With upgrade you describe, you'll expeirence major improvements. Also, it really depends on many factors in scene creation, I've created simple scenes, that took much longer to render then complex. From my experience, I learned that materials make a major difference in render times. 3D creation takes time, no matter how fast we desire to achieve renders. As I was told, go with the flow, enjoy, all will be complete in time.
You should get quite a bit better performance out of the new desktop. You may want to save up for another 8GB of RAM. You can never have to much and you will be able to do very big scenes without lagging. You may get a little bit of lagging if you have heavy scenes but its far better than the laptop you had. You are going to be much happier. With teh 4GB GPU you can now utilize Iray which will greatly increase quality of materials and renders. What kind of cooling does the system have?
Is there a way to background renders? Or when they are done with shared system RAM like on Inter HD Graphics is there a way to say take no more that 3GB? I only have 8GB RAM and nearly 1GB is for video RAM for the Intel HD Graphics 3000.
Well, I'm certainly not a Kid anymore, and I'm really not much of a Whiz, either, for that matter. However, relative to your more recent post, a couple of points:
"shared system RAM like on Inter HD Graphics"
Your onboard Intel graphics had to use system RAM because it had no video ram of its own. A dedicated card, like your new one has its own RAM on the card, and, in fact, cannot use the system RAM. In other words, if you are using GPU rendering, the majority of your system ram should be available for other tasks. You could set your system up so the 960 is used for rendering and the Intel graphics is used to drive the display, thus ensuring that most of the 4 GB of RAM on the video card is available for frame buffering your scene.
I have only one integrated Intel video card that used system RAM as video RAM. :-( I've looked through all the options on the NVidia iRay tab but see nothing except Optimize for Speed or Memory and Render Directly to File. Nothing that says don't allocate more the X amount of RAM for a scene. Maybe eventually that will be added.
Thanks.
"I have only one integrated Intel video card that used system RAM as video RAM"
Perhaps so far, but your new system, when it arrives, will also have Intel integrated video in addition to the video card, since all i7 processors have Intel video built into the CPU die.
You can't technically render in the background but you can set Daz to have a lower priority so that your other apps will still function while it's rendering. It's in the Task Manager, Details pane, right-click and Set priority.
I knew of that but it's mostly ineffective.
Set priority is not the correct answer for allowing other processes to work while rendering.
What you want to do is Set Affinity
task manager, click on processes tab, select Daz Studio, right click, select Set affinity, uncheck All processors and reduce by one the number of cores/threads it uses.
This will increase render time slightly, depending on number of cores/threads, but will all but eliminate the inability to continue working on other things in windows.
The only draw back is that you'll have to set that everytime you start the program, IIRC.
That's correct and DAZ Studio should do this in the DS Editor and I'd like this be an option when it forks and also limit the RAM taken to 3GB or some other locally appropriate value.
Nunesuch00, the only option i can currently provide for that level of control is to switch to windows server and use the resource manager. I know it will limit the Memory usage, but not sure off the top of my head on cpus.
The other flavors of consumer windows don't have that kind of control on resources, IIRC.
Ah, thanks. I forgot about Quotas. I've never tried them. I'll look now.
OK, I have only Windows 10 Pro but that's OK I will limit my renders to one or two people in a simple scene.
Quotas is a means of limited disk space by users in Windows for the curious.
DDCreate, yes, you should find an incredible improvement with the new system! I agree that you'd want to increase the sysem RAM. I look forward to hearing about your experience once the system arrives.