Clearing VRAM...

[Ethiopia]

I just read this thread in the Daz forums...
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/324616/how-to-clear-vram-memory-without-restarting-daz-studio
This clears up a long standing problem but also makes me wonder what the fuck the programmers and tech people at Daz are doing. Shouldn't they already know this? Do they even have any tech people left?

[Grouchy Old Fart]

Devil's Advocate: This may be a custom display driver or even an Iray bug, more than it is a DS bug. I say this because I use the NVIDIA official GeForce Studio Driver, and I never run out of vRAM, ever. I can run 10-20 renders in the same DS session (and I often do for testing) w/o running out of vRAM, and I only have 6GB of it on an RTX 2070 chipset.

It may help that I also set GPU affinity in the OS/driver options so that only DS and other CG tools get to use the RTX GPU, while everything else is forced to use the onboard Intel display driver instead. Finally, I don't have any graphics-intensive games installed on this box - I have a dedicated computer for gaming. My theory is that this avoids custom and screwball driver DirectX/OpenGL/Other middle-layer code blobs from competing for the same GPU and its vRAM (because most intensive games pre-load a lot of their bullshit to stay resident in RAM and even vRAM, even when not running, just to make loading/engine/response times faster.)

Not going to claim it's all perfect with DS, though. I can say there are times when a surface shader will go cattywumpus and turn blank-white in a render for no reason, but it's kinda rare. when it happens, it almost always traces to having multiple surfaces with the same name while I'm doing really experimental things in a scene.

[Ethiopia]

That's some excellent advice @pooper. You might wanna post that in Daz's forums since you obviously know more than that ass, Haseltine. My offline graphics computer also has nothing but CG stuff. I'll look into your driver tricks too.
Thanks for the info.

[Grouchy Old Fart]

Thought about going in there, but I doubt I'd get very far. 🙂

A decent step-by-step for using Windows 10/11 to set GPU vs. onboard display adapter affinity is here: https://www.digitalcitizen.life/set-default-gpu-windows-11/ It'll be a bit laborious, but worth it in the end, since it positively locks out every non-CG app from eating into vRAM.

I use GeForce Experience to handle the drivers, and that can be had here: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/drivers/

(GeForce Experience is a bloated disk hog, but it runs fairly merciful on all other system resources, and it does the job of managing drivers and notification of new ones well enough. Also, it allows you to swap from Game-Ready to Studio driver types. If one doesn't work well enough, the other might.)

[Spats]

@ethiopia

Was just reading that thread last week, too, after a search on the subject.
Haven't tried it yet but might soon. Wish there wasn't such a drastic workaround. (Not a fan of restarting the entire graphics subsystem just to clear VRAM for DAZ-only problems.)
Current beta is what now? With Iray version what? Can't understand how memory allocation and lockup is still a problem with DS. (Or maybe I can.) Meanwhile, latest Blender release just exponentially increased Cycles capabilities and decreased render times to a fraction of previous versions. Just dumb where DAZ sits. Nothing new.

@pooper

Have never not used GeForce Experience for updating. Never thought of the bloat factor, but would probably be happy exchanging it for the convenience and frequency of notifications and updates to the Studio drivers.
EDIT: Going to have to try your methods for the rest, for sure. Thanks for that advice.
Actually, not knowing specifically what you were referring to, I had already done this. (And actually have all versions of DS and Blender utilizing High Performance from Advanced Graphics dialog, individually.)(You can confirm that the settings have actually taken place from within the NVIDIA Control Panel, btw. Sometimes they have not, in my experience, and require a manual add or alteration.)
What I don't have is any actual evidence that it's helping DS at all. With Blender there was a marked improvement in rendering times and memory usage after the OS graphics settings change, even with older Blender versions. With the latest blender version and the new Cycles engine, the GPU utilization is incomparable; with nearly 100% at all times when rendering - and no VRAM release issues to speak of when not. (Keep dreaming DAZ users.)

[vande127]

I was having this problem and couldn’t find any way to clear the VRAM on the forums, so I started messing around with the Daz3D settings and found an easy way to do it without restarting Daz3D. It’s actually very simple and practical: in the Render Settings options, next to Editor, there’s a tab called Hardware. Just uncheck the GPU and then check it again, and Daz will instantly clear the VRAM. Do this after rendering and it will free up the memory without needing to restart Daz. This was the only solution I found.

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