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Too late for me since I solved my issue but, thanks for sharing this. I'm sure it'll help others!
Yeah. I sure learned my lesson.
I'm back in business, got 4.21 back from my backup, copied everything over to my main drive, made sure I have a second backup just in case and... yeah... that was a real waste of time but... shit happens. I'm just glad I have weekly backups of my system, I almost forgot I had them!
I have system restore enabled, but you have to remember to create a restore point before you upgrade. Luckily I have weekly backups of my system, it's lengthy process but I should be able to retrieve what I need from there.
Well that is why I asked for a link from trusted members of Zone but so far the only link I have is from FileCR, which I'm told SHOULD BE safe, but still. I unzipped it in a sandbox (Windows VM) to scan and make sure it's legit before I do it on my main computer. So far it looks like it is but I don't like it much TBH. It's sketch.
So if anyone is willing to zip the thing, upload it somewhere and send me a link privately, I would greatly appreciate and I'm willing to send points to say thanks.
I think I got my hands on the last 4.21. I need to make sure it's not full of viruses.
I'll make sure to backup old version of DS in the future before upgrading. It's the 1st time I have to go back, usually problems with new versions are not show stoppers. This time it's different but I'll have to do some more tests.
@melonlord Yeah thanks. I did find this link in my search but this is an unknown source to me, I'm not sure I can trust it. 🤔
@ethiopia Do you have 4.21.0.5 around? I made the mistake to "upgrade" to 4.22 and it's a disaster. TIA
This new version is a disaster for me. I was using Nvidia drivers 536.67 since the latest ones caused issues. So I updated DAZ and my drivers... instant regret. Some scenes don't render anymore, DAZ crashes, etc. How in hell could they break it so bad is beyond me.
Anyone knows how to go back to the DAZ Studio's old version? I won't even try to fix this mess...
I actually calculated the difference in the Daz log files. The SATA SSD consistently had a longer loading time.
Loading Time Formula: (Total Render Time – Device Render Time) = loading timeI did that. Never seen a significant difference in times, ever.
I tested a scene with 8 different figures wearing different clothing, two sailing ships, fog, and a bunch of props. There was a difference in loading times, with all assets stored on the SSD, between a SATA-III SSD and a PCIE 4.0 NVMe SSD.
I don't know how you were able to see a real difference. I tried with a huge scene, never could see anything significant between having everything (DAZ lib and scene) on a NVME drive vs HDD. If you look at IO metrics while loading scenes in DAZ and at the beginning of a render, IO will burst here and there but most of the time it's flat down to zero and DAZ is processing some shit.
I'm currently hosting my DAZ lib on an HDD and my scenes are on an SSD but in an enclosure so... going through USB 3. It's not any slower. And I have scenes with multiple characters and stuff that can use 18 GB of VRAM sometimes.
Unless things changed recently. My tests were executed over a year ago. So maybe it's different with new versions... but I doubt it.
The limiting factor is often the drive the assets are stored on and not the PCIE bandwidth of the cards. Even a PCIE 4.0 NVMe SSD is often the limiting factor when it comes to loading time and not the bandwidth of the slot the graphics card is in.
I tested that theory multiple times with DAZ and it has not been proven true. I tried a NVME drive vs a good old HDD and load times were about the same. If you look at IO data, disk access is very low in either cases. I think it's because DAZ isn't optimized. But my theory before I tested was that it would be a bit faster with a faster drive. At least not significantly. And I tried with large scenes.
I thought it was the other way around: that the 8GB GPU was dropped and the scene is rendered only with the bigger GPU… what is the case?
It will drop the GPU but keep going on the one with enough VRAM. That happened a lot when I had my Titan RTX with a 1080Ti. Sometimes scenes were just too large and Iray would just drop it but kept rendering on the Titan.
PCIE Generation and PCIE 8X vs PCIE 16X doesn’t matter in Daz Iray because all of the data is loaded to the VRAM before the render starts.
I agree. Even 4X doesn't change much, if anything. I never tested 2X though.
I don't know why people talk about SLI here. As someone else already stated, SLI has NOTHING to do with CUDA based multi GPU workloads. The only common thing is... both tech use multi GPUs. That stops right there.
NVLink could be interesting because it does support CUDA workloads... and the VRAM pooling thing is cool... but yeah, you have to have the right hardware.
I always had two and even at one time three GPUs while working with DAZ and Iray. Same gen GPUs, or one gen difference. I started with two GTX 970 (effing crap but it got me started). Then two 980Ti. Then two 1080Ti (with for a while a 1080 as a 3rd card but performance didn't improved much so I sold it). Then a Titan RTX and a 1080Ti. And finally as of now a 3090 with a Titan RTX. Each time I did tests, each time the double GPU setup won by a long shot.
I just did a test with a scene...
With Both GPUs: 3m50s
Only the 3090: 7m01s
Only the Titan RTX: 7m21sThat shows two things: 1) it's very close to double the speed and 2) that Titan RTX was a beast for its time, seeing how close it is to the huuuuuuge 2.5 slots 3090!!!
And BTW the Titan RTX runs at PCIe 3.0 4X and the 3090 at PCIe 4.0 16X. That also shows how bus speeds don't influence render times that much, even when loading up large scenes. And yes I also did multiple tests when I built my rig, before I decided to set it up this way.
Now... there's certainly an overhead to multi GPUs setups, and if your 2nd GPU can't even compensate for it and provide some more horses... it's worthless... and could probably in fact be a nuisance. Although I never experienced it myself except maybe for that time when I had 3 GPUs and maybe then the overhead was too high to be worth it.
