I am using a gtx 970 and when I try to render a scene using iray, the gpu utilization is barely around 10% and in spikes. The time to render even a simple scene takes close to an hour. In the hardware settings I have only selected the gpu to render the scene and I have the latest drivers for the gpu but for some reason it's not utilizing the gpu to the max, please help. Thank you.
With a 970 (4gb RAM) you're really asking a lot from the GPU. I used to have one so I know how slow it is. The slowness is because the memory load is too much for your GPU VRAM.
I would either upgrade if you can afford it or reduce the load by using a scene optimiser that can automatically reduce the texture sizes. You can use the one here or I have a simpler one that just reduces the textures.
Thanks, I had suspected its the vram but wasn't sure, now I know. I'll try out the scene optimizer but I would have liked to keep the same render quality but one can't have it all. Also it would help if I could get the simpler one that just reduces the textures, thanks.
With this scrip, (put it in the Scripts folder), you can choose between 1/8, 1/4 or 1/2 texture resizes. It won't overwrite the original files. Then you can swap the smaller sizes for the big ones. If it throws an error like a missing file while swapping just run the resizer again.
If you're doing a close-up you can use a full texture for the face/hair and lower ones (or none) for parts out of sight. Some light reading. Good luck.