Accidental Render Revelation: Restarting Helps

[Anonymous]

I hadn't seen this before when poking around on the internet looking for ways to speed up render times, so I figured I'd share:

So I was taking a render. My computer had my browser open as well as Daz. I used a culling camera, and the render took about 15 minutes. The experiment started when I noticed a flaw: poke through on some clothes. I fixed it. I stayed at the same angle throughout. It was the same shot. No objects taken away or added, just a quick fix on the clothes.

I take the render. After 18 minutes, the second render was about a third of the way done. Same shot. So I saved the scene subset, all things being equal.

Then I restarted my computer. I opened up the scene and my browser, just as it was before the restart. Everything was the same. I take the same render with the clothing fix, the one that was only 1/3 done after 18 minutes before the restart.

Done in 15 minutes or so. The render before the restart would have taken over an hour compared to 15 minutes after the restart. Restarting seemed to help enormously. I will be saving my subsets before taking a second render, then restarting my computer from now on.

[Frank21]

This is a well-known Daz Studio behaviour Dabbler. A lot of people re-start DS after their preliminary test renders, ie. before their final renders just for this reason. Daz Studio has, and to my knowledge has always had, serious memory handling problems.

[gts6]

Thats why I always leave GPU-Z running. If I see the VRAM memory used is high I try to free stuff up before starting a render. Sometimes its possible to free it up, either within DAZ or closing other windows that could be using it.

[Anonymous]

@Frank21

I had no idea. All of the things I've seen about speeding up renders were more about hiding/deleting objects from the scene, making HDRIs out of the environments, using section planes and culling cameras, etc. None of the YouTubers mentioned that a restart would make such a dramatic difference in render times. Pretty big omission when teaching beginners...

[donbasil]

Wait, so just save your scene and restart DAZ?

[Frank21]

I can usually get away with a few renders before I re-start for the final render but it depends on how heavy my scene is and how long I've been playing around with it (test renders). I'd definitely recommend a re-start in those cases.
Some people even re-start their pc but I don't think that's necessary.
Another issue I had with DS is it still running in processes (task manager) after I have closed it. It will eventually close after a few minutes but I usually have to kill it. Some people don't experience this problem so it might be a pc thing.

[Anonymous]

@donbasil

Not sure if a Daz restart will suffice or not. I'll have try it.

I just rebooted the PC, which is no biggie since I have an nvme HDD. It was probably faster to reboot entirely for me, since Daz is kinda wonky when I try to open it after closing it on my PC.

Either way, that two minutes it takes me to restart my rig and load the subset is worth it.

[Elim]

I generally restart if I think a render is taking too long and/or I want to cool my computer down and restart the render with the render queue option. Quite often this works if I'm doing something away from PC.

[Author]

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