I'm back!

My new video card has arrived! I quickly put it to the test. I started with an "impossible mission", which included both buildings of Argay's holiday house with all the furniture, all the vegetation on the island, all the vehicles (the boat and the buggy), and three characters (Reg, Cora, Miri). And all textures are intact, original size, meaning that the walls of both buildings are 8k, while the rest of the asste is mostly 4k.

Well, even though the new VGA was sweating, it started rendering along with the processor. This put a big smile on my face, as the old VGA was still only getting to the loading stage after several minutes of suffering. Of course, I will never render material of this size, so I stopped that too. I was just wondering if it would even start.

Then I used the picture below, because it is a roughly average picture from RoTCL. Roughly, because the walls in their original form are also equipped with 8k textures, which is not so typical for most of the assets I use.

Now, you should know that this image in its original state, with the 8k textures, takes 11.6 GB of VGA memory. My previous card was a 2060 with 6 GB, so it could only render the image in its original form if the processor was working alongside it, which makes rendering time take about forever. So I had to reduce the 8k textures down to at least 4k, what was 4k down to 2k (except for the characters, their clothes and hair, I only touch them when they are very far away from the camera).

The new 3060 has 12 GB of VRAM, so it's still marginal. However, it's on the right side of the limit, so I was able to render the image in all its glory for the first time ever. At first glance, you might not notice the difference, but if you look closely, the contours on the wall and floor are much more pronounced in the lowed version.

What's really significant is that it took me 10-15 minutes to make a scaled-down version with the previous VGA. The new card took 6 minutes 42 seconds to render the lowed version, and 7 minutes 16 seconds to render the original. This is certainly a significant improvement.

The new VGA rendered this image in 3 minutes. It used to take 6-8 minutes.

And this picture was rendered in 5 minutes 29 seconds. With the old VGA, it took 10-15 minutes to make images that took place in Rick and Cora's apartment.

So, the rendering time has been roughly halved, and I'm no longer so compelled to downscale textures. Of course, the possibilities are not endless. I still have to compose images sensibly, delete assets that are not in the image, and so on. However, I don't have to remove as much as before - this was particularly annoying in the reflective surfaces, which showed the lack of furniture in some rooms, or the lack of a character talking to the person in the picture. I don't have to downsample textures sometimes multiple times to fit in the video card memory, and so on.

Another big change is that if I set the viewport in Daz3D to Nvidia Iray, i.e. it creates a "live render" for me on the spot, the program doesn't freeze up anymore and it creates it really fast. This is good because I can check many things in the viewport that I could only check with many, many test renders before.

Oh, and the most significant improvement over last month: this VGA works!!!

Today I'm still testing, trying out the limits, advantages and disadvantages (if any). Then tomorrow I'm going to hit the ground running. There is work to be done. I'm not going to try to predict how long it will take to finish what's left, but I'll get it done faster than I would have with the previous VGA.

But I've already made some progress today, the first picture in the post with Cora, Daniel and Argay is brand new, I couldn't render this picture with the previous card. This was taken in 3 minutes 7 seconds, and it's another image that I had to reduce earlier versions of. Although there are no 8k textures, the island's vegetation and 3 characters take up a loose 8 GB of VRAM, which was also a problem with the 6 GB card. And even with the textures lowered, it took 8-10 minutes to render.

Now in all its glory, it takes 3 minutes to render and I could start rendering immediately without any extra work. So I'm happy. Happy, happy, happy!