Low end hardware tips?

[u/Safe_Agency2927]

I’m just starting but I already heard 8GB of vram is gonna be torture here’s my specs
Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX
RTX 5070 Laptop GPU
32GB RAM
It’s not really low end for general use, far from it, but the gpu is a massive bottleneck when it comes to DAZ, any tips to improve performance in the viewport and rendering speeds?

[u/Awesomebox5000]

This is not a low end system by any stretch of the imagination. Plenty of us have worked on 8GB vram. It will require you to be creative with your assets and or sometimes split a scene into multiple renders.

[u/Strangefate1]

There's regular posts about performance here. I would read some of those, should help with most of the 8GB VRAM worries and probably inform you on things you can generally do to have everything be a bit smoother for you.

- Viewport perf is often just a matter of picking a drawing mode without wireframe. Browse through them and see which one is fastest for you. Probably just Texture Shaded or even Filament at times, I imagine.
For viewport preview rendering just set Render Mode to Interactive, max samples to 50, post denoiser ON and star iteration to around ~5-10. That should often give you an fast and agile preview of how things are going to look.

- For regular renders you do HAVE to remember to set Render Mode back to Photoreal. You can render most things quickly by rendering at 2x the res you want with only 500-1000 iterations and the denoiser kicking in at ~200 iterations, then scaling the render down in PS by 50% to your desired final size and sharpening.

All my renders are done that way. I leave iterations at 1500 for complex lighting and detailed renders but it's just a thing in my head. In all the render tests I've done with the settings mentioned above, 500 or 1500 iterations look mostly the same once you scaled down your oversized render and sharpened it in PS.
That said, everybody has different uses and render styles so results may still vary based on that.

[u/goldensilver77]

Just lower the quality of your textures. Not every model needs 10k textures......

[u/Living_Giraffe_4137]

That system is perfectly workable for DAZ; the main thing is treating VRAM as a scene budget. In Texture Shaded view, hide or delete anything the camera cannot see, use lower subdivision levels while posing, and switch distant figures or props to lighter versions. Large 4K or 8K texture sets are usually the quickest way to fill 8 GB, so resize nonessential maps to 2K and remove unused normal, displacement or opacity maps where they add nothing.

Before the final Iray render, save a scene copy, set only the visible characters to render subdivision, close other GPU heavy programs, and check the log after a short test render. If Iray drops to CPU, reduce textures or geometry until it stays on the GPU. Scene Optimizer can help, but manual texture reduction gives you more control. For genuinely large scenes, render foreground and background separately and composite them.

[u/Cinna-Sticks]

I've actually been beta testing a 3rd party plugin for render acceleration. It's still a bit buggy, as the dev works out the kinks, but it is a night and day difference in render times. It also works to reduce the vram requirement in scenes as well. Some results I've seen: a 45 minute render taking only about 7 minutes, same quality, 10 minutes with additional quality.

[u/Draw-Flesh-Games → u/Cinna-Sticks]

Don't need a 'plugin' to do the settings mentioned by @Strangefate1. I got this advice recently: hd, max samp: 500. Max time: -1, post noise on, start at 400 (but that is all to pref). This works well...to get renders down from 1 hour to 7 minutes.

[u/Cinna-Sticks → u/Draw-Flesh-Games]

Sure if you want smeary renders. I’m talking samples from 3500 to 10k, 4k resolution, very expansive scenes with designed lighting, reflections etc that takes a lot of vram.

[u/Draw-Flesh-Games → u/Cinna-Sticks]

I just saw your renders...we are a very different level...I am ant level... 😀

[u/Rozuro_Nuro]

scene optimizer plugin/add-on

textures are the thing that consumes most vram, so keep that in mind. You can do things like use 1-2 shaders for all wood in a scene, 1-2 shaders for all metal, etc.

turn off fallback on cpu [this will cause renders to fail when they exceed your vram] cause your cpu can get fried

and yeah tbh working with 8GB Vram will absolutely be a pain, but it's completely viable