Question about dual video cards and Daz Studio...
Malandar
Posts: 776
Mainly does [Daz Studio] it support dual video cards at the moment. I am thinking of getting a couple of cards as an upgrade to my rendering computer.
Post edited by Richard Haseltine on
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Yes, if you mean Iray - each renders independently so they don't pool memory or limit the use of memory on the larger card, if there is one, but they certainly can speed the process.
Yeah, I pretty much only ever use IRAY these days. SO if I have two cards both will be used making the render go faster? Which is the main thing I am worried about. And the memory limit of the larger card would be the size of what you can get loaded into the scene?
I'm curious about this as well, since it was my understanding that Daz only uses one card at a time and something about falling back to the one with less ram, I'm probably remembering that wrong.
The way my son in law explained it is that one card can be used for Daz and the other card for everything else, and this would allow you to do other things on the computer without rendering being slowed down, I could also be remembering that wrong as well, but something along those lines.
People certainly used to say that Iray would only initialise on the GPUs if it individually fitted all of them (limiting you to the VRAM of the smallest or requiring that you disable them when doing larger scenes).
I can't confirm if that *was* true, as I didn't have dual GPUs at the time, but it's not the case any more - Iray will these days automatically use all (active) cards that the scene fits and just ignore those the scene can't load onto.
On this computer I have dual SLI 1080tii cards and I often disable the sli link. For my dual RTX 208ti machine I utilize NVLink for complex scenes that 11 GB VRAM from 1 card cannot handle. The NVLink is faster than SLI and it enables my GPUs to communicate with each other faster and share VRAM. But, the do not act as one regarding linear speed. With Octane, the 2 GPUs render 2x faster.
If you have two different cards, Iray will be limited to the vram of the smaller card. My old system had two 980Ti's and I never had an issue with Iray. I did speed tests early on and I did see it render twice as fast on two cards versus one. If you are using two cards with SLI, Nvidia has stated on their Iray website to disable SLI.
To use both cards, yes, but while I've heard that old versions of Iray would abort if the scene didn't separately fit both cards, I've tested this on newer versions of Iray and it is no longer true - if only one card is large enough, Iray is now happy to use only that one card.
It has never been true that Iray would not use the larger GPU is the smaller ran out of memory, though it has often been reproted that it will.
The log file isn't useful now but I just loaded a Genesis 9 with hair and clothes added and as expected the 1660 ran out of memory and did no work while the 2080Ti handled the rendering work judging by GPUz's reports.
I started with a 980 TI (6 GB); I added a 1080 TI (11 GB) later. For most scenes both cards would be used, but I had several that exceeded the 980 TI vram and Iray would report an 'Insufficient Memory' error, drop the 980 TI, and continue with the 1080 TI. Start a new scene in the same Studio session and both cards were back in the mix.
This is all very useful information and thank you all for the feedback. I have been wondering (if I can afford it and probably can't lol) about getting 2 cards. Due to low income I can't afford a new card so I watched for infomration on the forums and seems the 1080 Ti and 2080 Ti would be my best option. as both have 11 gigs of vram, which is a massive upgrade from my 650 with only 1 gig.
Thanks for the information everyone, this makes me want to grab a couple of 4070s with 12 or 16 gigs each since 4090s with 24 gigs are still around two grand each.
This Render PC i7-7700K CPU (4 cores) STRIX Z270E 64GB RAM GTX 1080ti x 2 451.77 Driver Cuda-Cores 4352 Other Render PC i9-9980XE CPU (18 cores) MEG X299 (MS7c06) 128GB RAM RTX 2080ti x 2 451.77 Driver Cuda-Cores 3584. I have water cooling and a huge power supply with a large amount of ram.
Anytime the machine gets hot the water coolng, along with an adequate power, saves the day. I think three of the most important issues are the power supply, the fans or cooilng system, and the RAM, in that exact order. If the power supply is inadequate you are SOOL. If the fans or cooling is too low you are jacked. If you don't have enough RAM thing get slow-w-w-w-w-w. RAM needs to be fast. If you don't have enough your PC has to stop, pause gather this and that, pause get this, pause some more and pick up that and this and not drop the other thing, causing the pc to skow down like molasses.
I have three video cards in my system and DS will use all of three. 2070, 2080, and 3080. Benefits vary but in general more complex scenes see more benefits. Less complex, not so much due to the overhead needed.