So… it turns out that the NVidia thread talking about DAZ being updated sometime in April was partially correct. I believe as of approximately 2-3 days ago, DAZ released a 6.x version alpha with support for 50xx series cards.
As such, I have been able to start using it to render some animations I’ve been toying around with. The image above is part of one such animation.
Things do feel like Christmas, as the 5090 that I got is finally starting to churn out some output for which I originally purchased it for. And it’s been pretty surprising- the performance on it compared to my 4060 TI that I had is approximate 4x, meaning it’s been generating around 4 frames for each 1 frame that the 4060 TI was generating.
How do I know? Well… it turns out that I had made another impulse purchase between last post and this one. Namely, I had bought a Sonnettech eGPU Breakaway Box. https://www.sonnetstore.com/collections/gpu-solutions/products/egpu-breakaway-box-750 Is the specific model I bought, though they now have a 750ex version.
So this eGPU enclosure was letting me connect my 4060TI to my PC via a USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 connection. This allowed me to run my two NVidia GPU’s side by side.
There were a few things this setup allowed me to do, which happens to also open up possibilities for future expansion.
For one, after fiddling around some with Windows 10’s GPU settings, I finally found out that by disabling my integrated GPU on my CPU chip (9950X), it would allow my 5090 and external 4060TI to be registered as GPU’s 0 and 1, I could finally specify which one I wanted to use with which process. Kind of sucks that Windows took away the option to allow nvidia’s control panel to target GPU’s, and so they kind of have a stupid windows-interpreted meaning for Power Savings/Performance GPU modes. So disabling the integrated GPU in device manager was my way of tricking the system into ironically registering the 5090 as the power saving GPU, and being able to target both GPU’s independently.
Now… there’s some funkiness where it seems like the two DAZ versions are storing hardware render settings in a shared registry or save file, because while I have the alpha installed via the Public Release channel running side-by-side with the 4.22/4.23 version (stable), sometimes, when I open the two different versions of DAZ, I’ll need to make sure that the proper hardware configuration is targeted on each. I.E. I want the 6.x version to target my 5090, while my 4.2x version targets the 4060 TI.
This has offered the opportunity to work on scenes in a separate instance (the 4.2x version) while I have been running renders using the 5090.
One quick note- while this has increased my workflow immeasurably, it is worth noting that it seems like dForce simulation (the physics engine) does not run using GPU acceleration, or if it does, it doesn’t scale particularly well.
For this second animation I have been working on, I’ve been wrestling over the last day with running the dForce animation so that Alexis’s wet hair sticks more closely to her.
There have been a myriad of weird behaviors, such as the hair exploding after around 115-130 frames simulated (forcing me to save two separate files for two different ranges of running the simulation). There’s also been an inability to run the simulation stably on the two separate versions of DAZ simultaneously.
Fun times.
Either way, I’ve been relatively happy with the progress I’ve been making this month. But yeah, there’s another part of my mind that’s been kind of procrastinating on the programming/dialog side of changes.
That said, I have also been doing additional learning, watching parts of StudioBinder’s The Shot List playlist- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyML8xuKfoc&list=PLEzQZpmbzckV0_a2QCO2qF9Yfe-LKSDha There are a lot of great details in it for some more cinematic-standard techniques for storytelling. Things that make me look back on my work, and start seeing more of the gaps in the way my renders are constructed.
Apart from the serious, I’ve also replayed Mutt & Jeff’s Pale Carnations up to the most recent update again, from the beginning this time, and taking much more of an emotionally invested, non-nihilistic approach towards the playthrough.
It can be seen as my “be a good boy” playthrough. When taking this worldview in the play through… the experience is surprisingly different, and the Machiavellian decision-maker inside me takes a much more nuanced and cautious approach.
It was really refreshing, and made me appreciate the effort the developers made towards creating that world.
I guess my takeaway this time was that if you’re not playing as a horndog man-slut… Rosalind and Felicia turn out to be a lot less sympathetic as characters than you’d like. Ian becomes a true bro, for whom you would not get entangled with Mina’s wiles.
This type of balancing and complexity is really refreshing, as it inspires the player to be thoughtful and balanced, making choices that fit the moment but also which force them to make certain projections towards what may happen in the future.
It’s rather… delightful.