Hoping for some upgrade advice...

[spearcarrier]

I asked this in another forum with less than informative results. So I hope, even though this is off topic, folks will bear with me here. I have a technical question.

For the sake of this question, let's assume that I'm not a third generation heir to the Trump dynasty. I need (not want) to make my puter a little faster, but can only pick one part. Also, in this fantasy world, I do this frequently and this tactic works quite well. Oh, and I have some ponies and a cat that talks.

So in this fantasy dreamworld I am running an 8 core processor with 2 GTX 950 video cards.
This worked well for a while but with upgrades and whatever, things have gotten slow and my demands have gotten bigger. I want to do one of two things.I usually use DAZ 3D and render cartoons, which use 3Delight. Poser works great until I try to use the fitting room, which I bought it for, and then the puter goes so slow I just guess and hit go.

Option A: Call Mr. October and get him to buy me a new motherboard and CPU.
Option B: Call Putin and get him to buy me a Nvidia Titan, which I've been coveting for a year.

I can only choose one option. And that option will set me down a road to adventure that the other option would not.

So my question is... would I be able to tell the difference between one and the other? I'm not interested in going to one of those build a computer tech sites for my answers because I'm not a third generation heir, and I can't do that. And I just want some random thoughts from regular people.... please....

 

[English Bob]

One thing you haven't mentioned is the rest of your computer spec, such as whether you have an SSD, and in particular how much RAM you have. If you have 8 cores, then the most useful improvement is probably more RAM. A superior video card should help with GPU rendering, but won't impact other areas of 3D graphics much.

Assuming you're on Windows, run Resource Monitor while you're doing stuff that's slow, to see where the bottleneck is. Is your CPU running at 99%? Is your disk churning the paging file because you're getting low on RAM? Something else?

 

[Gadget Girl]

Poser works great until I try to use the fitting room, which I bought it for, and then the puter goes so slow I just guess and hit go.

So just a thought. I'm not sure at what point the fitting room slows down for you, but I've noticed for me, if I try to use it to add morphs, Poser often gives up and crashes on me. I'm usually better off copying morphs after I've created the figure.

Don't know if that helps or not.

 

[Pendraia]

Personally I've been coveting a titan for a while and they're supposed to be fantastic for Iray but you mentioned using 3Delight so I'm not sure if they would have the same impact.

That said, English Bob has given some good advice about finding out what is slowing the system down. I'm assuming you have page files set up already to make the best use of any empty space on hard drives.

I tend to go for RAM and when I can't add more RAM I look at updating the motherboard and CPU, mainly because RAM is fairly cheap in comparison and will often fix problems. I'd also look at how much RAM there is on your video card because that can also impact.

That said I'm not an expert or computer whiz.

 

[kobaltkween]

Whoa. I have a similar setup and my performance is pretty fast. As in, I have no problem at this second with 4 instances of Blender running, some in render preview and one with millions of polys in the scene, Poser open, Fireworks open, and Opera with more tabs than I can count, five of which are YouTube.

Based on what you've said, I wouldn't put any money at all into a video card. That won't change what you've said you do- toons in 3Delight- at all. It would be great for games, but unless you're using Iray or Superfly in GPU mode, well, what you have now is _huge_ overkill. You could sell one of those cards and your performance would be the same.

You could go for a new processor (probably don't need a whole new motherboard unless the processor requires it), but I think, as others have already said, the RAM is more likely to be your bottleneck. Unless those 8 cores are wicked slow. And you should definitely check your Task Manager to see what your CPU and RAM usage are like at peaks. And to make sure that nothing malicious is running. Also, you might want to check your network traffic. If you have a trojan or virus listed innocuously in your Task Manager, you can sometimes spot the culprit due to seeing a whole bunch of traffic when there shouldn't be any.

Oh! And if your performance issues are specifically with DS, you might look into those PostgreSQL instances it spawns. Make sure they're not taking up tons of resources.

 

[phdubrov]

8 core processor

AMD or Intel cores? AFAIR it can be huge difference it render.
And I don't remember, but how many cores embedded in DS 3Delight can now use? And how many cores Fitting Room can use (I suspect 1 or 2)?

And yes, first suspect is RAM.

 

[spearcarrier]

All these replies and I never knew they were there.

32 RAM, which has maxed out the board. I can't tell you the board exactly. I do know things are great until I try to do these two things.

With Poser,: it slows down just as soon as the windows load their items. I can be patient and wait six, seven or twelve minutes to brush back the points on an item... or yeah. I'm not patient.

3Delight ... hours to render 1 second of animation. 2 Hours at best. I kid you not. I cry. Cry!

I once looked into how to render direct out using 3Delight - and that was FAST FAST FAST! But I lost my shaders doing that... and couldn't find a way to keep them so had to dump that idea.

This is what I ended up getting:

ASUS X99-E motherboard
i7-6850K core
and I'll be keeping the video cards for the moment.

I chose to upgrade my motherboard because my cat found a useful article, and read it to me, talking about the best cheap setup for 2017 for someone in my budget range. My cat is pretty darn smart. Mr. October isn't returning my phone calls, though.

This motherboard takes more RAM, a plus, and the 6850 has more cores and came recommended for my situation. Now if only Amazon would ship the stupid things already.

I chose this route instead of the video card because of 3Delight: it was my tale-tale sign I was told not by my cat but by other folks who use DAZ. The core and motherboard were both too weak, and getting that Titan would have been nice but it would only have helped a little.

As far as the titan goes: the article my cat found also said the the GTX 1080 does a better job than the Titan for half the price.

I'm also thinking of going with changing to a water cooling system, but I have no experience with that! So that's something I'll need a looooot of help on.

 

[spearcarrier]

Oh! And if your performance issues are specifically with DS, you might look into those PostgreSQL instances it spawns. Make sure they're not taking up tons of resources.

But but... what does that MEAN.....

 

[Pendraia]

Glad you got it sorted Spearcarrier and thanks for the tip on the card.

 

[Semicharm]

All these replies and I never knew they were there.

32 RAM, which has maxed out the board. I can't tell you the board exactly. I do know things are great until I try to do these two things.

With Poser,: it slows down just as soon as the windows load their items. I can be patient and wait six, seven or twelve minutes to brush back the points on an item... or yeah. I'm not patient.

3Delight ... hours to render 1 second of animation. 2 Hours at best. I kid you not. I cry. Cry!

I once looked into how to render direct out using 3Delight - and that was FAST FAST FAST! But I lost my shaders doing that... and couldn't find a way to keep them so had to dump that idea.

This is what I ended up getting:

ASUS X99-E motherboard
i7-6850K core
and I'll be keeping the video cards for the moment.

I chose to upgrade my motherboard because my cat found a useful article, and read it to me, talking about the best cheap setup for 2017 for someone in my budget range. My cat is pretty darn smart. Mr. October isn't returning my phone calls, though.

This motherboard takes more RAM, a plus, and the 6850 has more cores and came recommended for my situation. Now if only Amazon would ship the stupid things already.

I chose this route instead of the video card because of 3Delight: it was my tale-tale sign I was told not by my cat but by other folks who use DAZ. The core and motherboard were both too weak, and getting that Titan would have been nice but it would only have helped a little.

As far as the titan goes: the article my cat found also said the the GTX 1080 does a better job than the Titan for half the price.

I'm also thinking of going with changing to a water cooling system, but I have no experience with that! So that's something I'll need a looooot of help on.

I have a plucky AMD x8 CPU, 16GB ram and a GTX 1050Ti. Your rig should easily smoke mine without breaking sweat, yet I don't have any of those performance issues.

Two things come to mind. What is your CPU and RAM usage when not running DS or Poser? What do you have for storage?

I found that getting an SSD helped a LOT. Of course, I couldn't move all of my content to it--had to settle for just the base items in content and runtime folders on the SSD. Between that and having the apps store their temp files on there, they run much faster than from my hard drive.

As for water cooling... I don't have any personal experience with that but I've talked to a few who have. There are prebuilt kits with tubing and everything preconnected and tested. That's not as neat and tidy as a custom setup, but much easier for newbies to get their feet wet...and keep their rig dry. BTW, do you have high humidity where you live. Condensation can be a problem with water coolers.

 

[Semicharm]

But but... what does that MEAN.....

DS uses an external database engine for their content management system. The current one is PostgreSQL. I'm an old-school Poser user, so I don't use that in DS. It's kinda useless for all of my old content anyway.

 

[Deleted member 325]

I am actually thinking you might be hitting a RAM issue. I say this, as on my Quad Core or even Twelve-cores sometimes Renders or Dynamic sims run slow if I have a lot of content, but other times, they are blazing fast (mainly because I need more ram on it).
As your RAM maxes out, your system will use the swap file much more, and the HD read/write will bring even the fastest CPU/GPU combo to a crawl.

Now, it may not just be a ram issue - it may be a system that is actually a 32 bit disguised as 64 bit (certain versions of Win 7, a non-pro version of Poser prior to 11...).

So my question would be, what OS are you running, and how much ram is installed.?

 

[kobaltkween]

Um, wow. So it sounds like you have a serious problem, and it's probably not your hardware. You shouldn't even be having RAM issues. I have an almost identical box, and it _smokes_. I have several instances of Blender open, Poser open, and I recently had DS open, too. Oh, and Fireworks. No problems, no slow downs. Certainly not 6 to 12 minutes to load Poser. I have no clue what you mean by "brush back their points," but I've used the morph tool easily on a _much_ lower powered machine. The only time I've seen a slow down is when I've had my video cards chugging away on a Cycles render with full caustics and I decided to watch anime at the same time. And mind, one of those Blender instances has a scene with 1.3 million faces and counting. On render display.

It's been more than decade since I tried to render animation, so I have no clue about that speed. Especially without knowing what render engine you're using. Still, it should be comparatively fast. I just had my preview render get to 400 samples in the time it took to edit, not write, the above paragraph.

So sure, upgrade your hardware, but I'd be looking at software, and most specifically viruses or trojans. You've got _tons_ of horsepower, and you're not describing anything that would reasonably use it up. Unless you're working with scenes in the hundreds of millions of polys.

 

[Semicharm]

I am actually thinking you might be hitting a RAM issue. I say this, as on my Quad Core or even Twelve-cores sometimes Renders or Dynamic sims run slow if I have a lot of content, but other times, they are blazing fast (mainly because I need more ram on it).
As your RAM maxes out, your system will use the swap file much more, and the HD read/write will bring even the fastest CPU/GPU combo to a crawl.

Now, it may not just be a ram issue - it may be a system that is actually a 32 bit disguised as 64 bit (certain versions of Win 7, a non-pro version of Poser prior to 11...).

So my question would be, what OS are you running, and how much ram is installed.?

In that case, it wouldn't slow down. A 32bit app would just crash or throw an error when maxing out the amount of addressable RAM. I used to be stuck with ~4GB for a long time. Upgraded to 16GB, but was still stuck with 32bit Poser till recently.

FYI, for those with a 64bit OS and plenty of RAM, but only a 32bit version of Poser, you can run the renderer in a separate process. That way, it gets its own 3GB of address space to work with, outside of the main app.

 

[Deleted member 325]

In that case, it wouldn't slow down. A 32bit app would just crash or throw an error when maxing out the amount of addressable RAM. I used to be stuck with ~4GB for a long time. Upgraded to 16GB, but was still stuck with 32bit Poser till recently.

Nope, it can and would slow down - which is why I have mentioned it. I have a lot of experience with 3D and the various issues. On a 32 bit version you will see significant slowdown in the interface long before it crashes. On a 64 bit version everything may seem fine until you go to render and the resources have exceeded available RAM, causing the system to use the swap file, which can turn a 10 or 15 minute render into hours or longer. Additionally, certain features such as DOF and Motion blur use substantially higher memory because they recalculate the pixels. In addition to all of the geometry and textures in your scene, you need enough RAM to cover the memory of the final rendered image for each pass it is enabled for. which will also often cause problems in rendering on systems without the RAM that are not apparent in the setup stages.

Also, FYI, you can run the render in a separate process on a 32 bit version of Poser on a 32 bit system as well, giving it a separate memory allocation. This has been possible since Poser 7, but will only exacerbate memory issues with rendering not readily apparent in the setup stages.

 

[Semicharm]

Nope, it can and would slow down - which is why I have mentioned it. I have a lot of experience with 3D and the various issues. On a 32 bit version you will see significant slowdown in the interface long before it crashes.

Depends on a lot of variables, especially how much system RAM is available to start with. Hitting the swap file will slow down anything. Maxing out GPU RAM will slow down the UI as well, as resources have to be paged to system RAM just to draw the preview. (Not sure how much GPU memory a 32bit app can address.) Those, however, are really more systems issues than app issues.

I've used a number of 32-bit 3D apps in a 32bit and 64bit OS with only 4GB RAM. Even after upgrading to a bigger system, I was still stuck with the same 32-bit apps. The upgrade removed most of the bottlenecks and performance issues. Well, an SSD helped too.

Also, FYI, you can run the render in a separate process on a 32 bit version of Poser on a 32 bit system as well, giving it a separate memory allocation. This has been possible since Poser 7, but will only exacerbate memory issues with rendering not readily apparent in the setup stages.

Which is precisely why I didn't recommend it.

 

[spearcarrier]

Lawks. Once again I didn't get notification on these replies. Why why why do forums do that to me...

Yer probably right it's a RAM issue. The new puter is put together and... is actually slower than the old one, but I know this is because we forgot the all important... RAM that fits. Yes. I had no sheep for my new meadow. So I'm running on 16GB when I used to have 32 and I can sure tell the difference. I'm waiting on a new RAM stick to arrive in the mail now. I'll have to build that up slowly due to finances.

Hearing the issues might not have been hardware kind of scare me. This puter is rarely on the internet because there's no point. It runs only what I need, and I keep things down on the low simply for my sanity. But I can tell you that I've been working on creating dynamic hair props lately for DAZ. (That's a tall order as I have to take the hair prop I like and essentially remodel it. I need to brainwash all of the hair prop creators to weld their objects neatly and give each one a mask. No. I'm not kidding. I just need the minions and the evil funds from the evil bank. And shoot the next person that tells me to use VWD with a dart of silence.) I tend to have to increase vertices a lot. And do a lot of memory hogging things. My objects and things will often end up with a higher memory load than the ones you buy in the store as a result.

Also, when animating, sometimes I'll stick the characters in a full on scene. That alone is a lot of work for the puter I'm given to understand.

But currently running Windows 7 Professional, 64bit, 16GB of little sheep, and the new core that I'd linked earlier in the thread.

 

[modus0]

For watercooling, a good first-step purchase would be a CPU AIO (All-in-One) water-cooling kit. There are numerous versions available, from numerous companies, but they are essentially a pump built into the CPU block, and two hoses going to a radiator, all of that already assembled and filled. They also tend to be cheaper than going for a custom-built CPU water-cooling loop. And installation is only slightly more difficult than installing an air-cooler for a CPU.

 

[spearcarrier]

Oh, well that doesn't sound too too terrifying. After I get all the RAM my heard desires I'm pretty sure I'll be looking into it.

We've been wondering if maybe the real reason why my puter slowed down is one of the cards died. We'll hopefully be looking at that today.