why do textures for turned off items end up in the render textures?

alan bard newcomer

There are discussions about ways to have the renderer ignore stuff but just turning something off should do that, right. 
I have a crow that is occasionally in a scene .. other tiimes it's turned off and I'll still see the crow feather images loading into the start of the render and yes even if it hasn't been turned on at all in the scene session. 

crosswind

What do you mean by "turn off" ?  Visibility ? Cutout Opacity ?  Hide Geometry ?

Loading texture images doesn't mean they'll be finally fed into VRAM...

alan bard newcomer

crosswind said:

What do you mean by "turn off" ?  Visibility ? Cutout Opacity ?  Hide Geometry ?

Loading texture images doesn't mean they'll be finally fed into VRAM...

Turning them off in the scene pane ... not visible in the viewport nor the final render. 
As models become more complex I am barely ahead of them with a combo of a 1080ti and a titanX ... before I moved the titan with it's 12g into the new machine I hadn't realized how many of my scenes pushed over 11g. 
Not certain of the programming considerationsn, within iray) but back when I had the titan 12g and a 980ti ... the render engine certainly used the 980 for some processing because  GPU-Z would show it at 5g while the titan was at 11 g. 
---
And until I added the titan in the new machine I getting renders that failed to load all the textures etc.and stopped before actually rendering and were reporting a shortage of vram to load stuff. 
As far as rendering I could do large scenes in sections but I'm not certain if all thing was loaded back then or not because the verboise listed didn't show that info until recently
 

alexander.naghiu

@alan

I too was under the same impression. My setup has a 4090 and a scene with 3 figures in a room would eat up 22 Gb of my VRAM. I had a ton of stuff made invisible so I was also under the impression that the invisible textures are also rendered.

To test this, I started a new scene and rendered two Genesis 9 figures. Then I rendered figure A only and set figure B to invisible. Repeated the same for figure B and the results were consistent. The hidden textures are not loaded in VRAM.

However! It still feels like VRAM is bloated.

Having 3 figures, all subd 3, textures 4k in a room with some furniture with 2k textures, all this would take up 22Gb is insane. And I can not explain this. I've tried to find a way to analyze what takes up so much VRAM, textures, geometry, other stuff, but have yet to find a way to do this.

kpr

If you are sufficiently intrigued...

Use Scene-Optimizer and take a look at all of the textures and other maps (distance from camera included)
    IME: If you learn to use that add-in well you can render v complex scenes on modest-spec machines

OR

Turn off "CPU fallback"

Make a blank scene. Load a figure, then render it:

•     First with G9 figure (using G9 textures)
•     Then G8 Figure (using G8 textures) - reboot your machine 1st
•     Then G3 figure (using G3 textures) - reboot your machine 1st

    
    Do all 3 again using G9 textures (even if it look horrific) - reboot your machine each time

•         No need to do G9/G9... you did that above!

Still unconvinced?

• Load two identical base G9 (not a clone)
  • See how that compares to test-1 above

REMs: 

• What you read in the "Daz log file" is Daz reading textures in your scene 
  • Not the same as what textures (duplicates / hidden models) get loaded into your VRAM
• If you "compress" textures using Scene-Optimizer you can render "many more models"

 

alexander.naghiu

I will try that, seems like a plausible test. 

I did a test of my own for which I opened another thread (still waiting for approval until it shows). Here my findings:

My question: why does a simple scene use up >10 Gb of VRAM

My system: AMD Ryzen 9 7950X, 128 gb RAM, nVidia RTX 4090 24 Gb VRAM. | Daz version 4.21 (not the BETA) 

Scene setup: 1 x Genesis 9 figure + 1 x Sofa (see attachment for detailed scene content)

I actually went into all the surfaces that have textures, opened them in their folders and noted down their size on my hard drive. The total texture size on HDD: 0.99 Gb (detailed break-up in attachment).

I did 2 test runs. First one with the figure set at SubD4 and the second one with the figure set at SubD3. Between them I've restarted my PC. I took a measurement of VRAM usage with the scene loaded before and after render for both runs (details in attachment).

Findings: 

Run 1 - SubD 4:

• used VRAM during render: 12.16 Gb used (difference between VRAM load and baseline VRAM usage)
• render: 151 iterations / 56 seconds / 76.19 convergence

Run 2 - SubD 3:

• used VRAM during render: 10.80 Gb used (difference between VRAM load and baseline VRAM usage)
• render: 154 iterations / 56 seconds / 76.28 convergence

How can this be explained? One Genesis 9 figure with complex skin and one simple couch, 10-12 Gb VRAM usage. That is insane!

Please let me know what you think and tell me if my test logic was wrong. 

Thanks! Alex

I will try your test too in the evening and wirte my findings here.

Alex