Someone asked privately if the new Poser beta supported the higher-end GTX cards with Turing architecture also. The answer is interesting enough I wanted to share it here.

In our development testing on Windows thus far, we've seen these changes work properly on pre-GTX, GTX, and RTX cards. In fact, we've yet to find an NVIDIA card manufactured in the last decade that did not work.

Hopefully, this situation will continue but that's why we beta test with larger group.

Thanks, Tim. Good to see clear, concise information being provided to customers.

Good luck with the testing!

Thanks Tim, as most comments about the updating in PP11.3 up until now only mentioned RTX cards, so it's good for folks with the newer GTX/Turing GPU cards to know they'll benefit by this upgrade as well.

I have no idea if Poser supports instances but if it did it would be great for complicated large scenes to keep polygon count low.. maybe that's one more thought to keep in mind! :)

-renapd- posted at 1:12PM Sat, 08 February 2020 - #4379506

I have no idea if Poser supports instances but if it did it would be great for complicated large scenes to keep polygon count low.. maybe that's one more thought to keep in mind! :)

Out of the box, Poser does not support instancing but there are a few scripts from third parties that do provide it.

any release notes?

movida posted at 2:23PM Sat, 08 February 2020 - #4379518

any release notes?

If you go to posersoftware.com and click the Downloads link at the top of the page, it takes you to the latest Installer and Support downloads, as well as a link to "additional" downloads. At the bottom of that page is a group of downloads for the Beta Testers, and the last item in that group is the current Release Notes. It's a link to a text file so just click on it, and it will open in your browser.

Thank you Miss B - I wasn't a Beta Tester so didn't go look :)

I looked over the release notes. Saw six points, and so far none of them pertain to me. Is this a critical update? Will there be issues if I don't update?

Thanks for the info!! I'm guessing that this will use the latest version of Cycles? If so, I'm also wondering if anyone knows 11.3 also supports out of core memory (rendering scenes larger than will fit in GPU Memory using system RAM, but still rendering on the GPU)? IMHO this would be huge, and might entice me to seriously consider upgrading!

Regardless, it's good to see Poser moving forward again

Think that's a pascal nvidia driver function and not related to poser or cycles, if you're 10xx card plus recent driver version (2017+ ?) it should work. I've rendered 30GB texture scene on a 8GB card ok.

movida posted at 7:11PM Sat, 08 February 2020 - #4379558

Thank you Miss B - I wasn't a Beta Tester so didn't go look :)

I'm not a Poser Beta Tester either, but was curious enough about the RTX/GTX Turing update to maybe try the beta version. Then I saw the Release Notes link, and went for that instead, as it's something I've wanted to see for some time.

DustRider posted at 1:24AM Sun, 09 February 2020 - #4379591

If so, I'm also wondering if anyone knows 11.3 also supports out of core memory (rendering scenes larger than will fit in GPU Memory using system RAM, but still rendering on the GPU)? IMHO this would be huge, and might entice me to seriously consider upgrading!

Poser SuperFly always had support for out of core memory. In fact it was the Poser dev team who intruduced that feature to Cycles and gave it back to the Blender community.

New beta installers building now & should push to website within an hour. Includes updated Release Notes with more info on bug fixes.

How about using the background material to light the scene? This is where I get Poser to crash my GTX cards and have to close and re-start Poser or re-boot my machine.

Well, I checked out the updated release notes but, I'm kinda stupid. what does this mean exactly? Ray Trace preview now gets updated pose

Does that mean when you change anything it automatically updates?

And do the nodes still jump around all over the place when you ungroup them?

These were the notes on how to reproduce bug & apparently it's been there a while.

Launch Poser to the main default scene. Add a ball prop.
Open the Raytrace Preview window. Set to Auto Refresh.
Set render to Preview. Render.
Pose the figure and move the prop, change the camera position and lighting position.
Notice the scene updates all aspects of the scene in the Raytrace Preview window.
Set render to FireFly or SuperFly. Render.
Pose the figure and move the prop, change the camera position and lighting position.
Notice the scene updates the prop, the lighting, camera but not the figure pose in the Raytrace Preview window.

tim posted at 11:04AM Sun, 09 February 2020 - #4379632

These were the notes on how to reproduce bug & apparently it's been there a while.

Launch Poser to the main default scene. Add a ball prop.
Open the Raytrace Preview window. Set to Auto Refresh.
Set render to Preview. Render.
Pose the figure and move the prop, change the camera position and lighting position.
Notice the scene updates all aspects of the scene in the Raytrace Preview window.
Set render to FireFly or SuperFly. Render.
Pose the figure and move the prop, change the camera position and lighting position.
Notice the scene updates the prop, the lighting, camera but not the figure pose in the Raytrace Preview window.

Tim, two things... 1) is the Raytrace window supposed to update automatically or does it have to wait until the refresh button is pushed? 2) can the Ray trace window be made larger? It doesn't have to be the same size as Preview, but I'm not going to lie, my eyes aren't what they used to be.

ironsoul posted at 11:54AM Sun, 09 February 2020 - #4379592

Think that's a pascal nvidia driver function and not related to poser or cycles, if you're 10xx card plus recent driver version (2017+ ?) it should work. I've rendered 30GB texture scene on a 8GB card ok.

Thanks!! That's huge, I must have been under a rock when they announced out of core memory (they really should make this a big marketing bullet point ... or maybe they have and I'm just blind). Hopefully after 11.3 comes out I can give the free demo a test drive (RTX card). Might have to start saving some $$ to get the upgrade.

DustRider posted at 8:51PM Sun, 09 February 2020 - #4379658

ironsoul posted at 11:54AM Sun, 09 February 2020 - #4379592

Think that's a pascal nvidia driver function and not related to poser or cycles, if you're 10xx card plus recent driver version (2017+ ?) it should work. I've rendered 30GB texture scene on a 8GB card ok.

Thanks!! That's huge, I must have been under a rock when they announced out of core memory (they really should make this a big marketing bullet point ... or maybe they have and I'm just blind). Hopefully after 11.3 comes out I can give the free demo a test drive (RTX card). Might have to start saving some $$ to get the upgrade.

I re-ran the render to check the stats - whilst the used memory during render was 30GB the actual reported render memory size was just over 11GB. Assuming this represents the max allocated memory and not "total over time" this is 3GB more than the on board graphics card memory of 8GB which I'm taking as evidence of out-of-core being used. The scene itself is a single figure + armour set which is using texture sets up to 8K in size. I've pasted a screen shot of the Windows 10 GPU stats below..

Has anyone tried this with an rtx card yet to see what render times are like, perhaps using this

https://www.renderosity.com/mod/freestuff/benchmark-test-scene-for-superfly-/83640

so we can make comparisons?

Thanks Ironsoul! It definitely looks like it's using out of core memory.

Nails60 posted at 3:02PM Sun, 16 February 2020 - #4380485

Has anyone tried this with an rtx card yet to see what render times are like, perhaps using this

https://www.renderosity.com/mod/freestuff/benchmark-test-scene-for-superfly-/83640

so we can make comparisons?

That one takes a LONG time to render even with a RTX card. I think we need a better test scene to check with.

I only suggested that one as it is available to all using standard poser content, and has a range of material types. With my GTX 1080 and rending settings/dimensions as set up in the scene, other than turning off progressive rendering and increasing bucket to 512 I think, it took about 21 minutes (although I think there may have been some cpu throttling as one core was running as max turbo boost throughout). I was hoping (dreaming) someone would come on and say it only took 7 minutes with an RTX card

But if anyone could give comparative figures with an RTX and GTX card for the any scene that would help me to decide if I need to start saving my pennies to buy an RTX card! (Although looking at prices think I'll need to buy a bigger piggy bank first!)

Nails60 posted at 6:41PM Sun, 16 February 2020 - #4380680

I only suggested that one as it is available to all using standard poser content, and has a range of material types. With my GTX 1080 and rending settings/dimensions as set up in the scene, other than turning off progressive rendering and increasing bucket to 512 I think, it took about 21 minutes (although I think there may have been some cpu throttling as one core was running as max turbo boost throughout). I was hoping (dreaming) someone would come on and say it only took 7 minutes with an RTX card

But if anyone could give comparative figures with an RTX and GTX card for the any scene that would help me to decide if I need to start saving my pennies to buy an RTX card! (Although looking at prices think I'll need to buy a bigger piggy bank first!)

That scene took me 31 minutes with my RTX 2080 SUPER 8GB.

Thanks for info, with a 2080ti costing 1000gbp + , I don't think I'll be upgrading until one of my machines gives up the ghost

I downloaded the 11.3 beta and ran some test renders. I'm getting some very strange results - maybe there is some work still to be done on this version.

With the test scene mentioned above (https://www.renderosity.com/mod/freestuff/benchmark-test-scene-for-superfly-/83640), using the settings as loaded, I got:

GTX 1080Ti: 6600.24 Seconds

RTX 2080Ti: 622.54 Seconds

GTX 1080Ti+RTX1080Ti: 373.8 Seconds

This seems to be a real rendering problem for the 1080Ti, which doesn't seem to be the case in earlier version of Poser running this scene.

I set up a scene using La Femme for a portrait: 5960X 25.86

1080Ti 286.28 sec

2080Ti 190.61 sec

1080TI+2080Ti 71.98 sec

Finally, I loaded one of the new included scenes - AJ Futuristic Base 5960X 151.41 sec

1080Ti 208.41 sec

2080Ti 14.70 sec

1080TI+2080Ti 10.73 sec

Even on these much smaller scenes, the 1080Ti seems to be struggling. Admittedly, I am very out of practice with Poser, so I didn't do much in the way of tweaking bucket size etc, but I would have though that would not have had an effect on the difference between the 1080Ti and the 2080Ti. I wish that I had run a test using Poser 11.2 first.

Scene's kind of dark isn't it? Does render time improve if you increase the lighting or use hdr?

It is dark, which likely increases the render time with Superfly. But that doesn't explain the huge difference between the GTX 1080ti and the RTX 2080ti - especially since both together show that the 1080ti is having a reasonable effect on render time. Not sure if a HDR would add much since the scene is "indoors", but I'll have a go with more lighting to see what difference it makes. The final scene that I rendered - AJ Futuristic Base - is very bright, yet the speed of the GTX 1080ti still seems wrong, especially when compared to the CPU render. Huge improvement with the 2080ti though.

I seem to recall somewhere else reading about 1080ti problems, might have been on Smith Micro poser forum. Re-downloaded the scene, did the render but with progressive turned off, time of1022 seconds on my gtx 1080 (non ti), running now with progressive on, back in 10=15 minutes with result.

Thank you very much for your results

1081 seconds with progressive turned on, about a minute longer

Thanks for posting your results Nails60. I'll have a search for any mention of 1080Ti problems. Interesting that your 1080 is rendering the scene in around 1/6 of the time. What version of Poser 11 are you using?

I found the thread about 1080ti performance: https://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/?thread_id=2939036

Interesting that several people are finding the same as I have - the 1080ti alone is very slow, but when working with another card (even a slower one), it is running at around the speed that you would expect.

Dim_Reapers results are kind of what I would have expected given results I've seen with RTX (Optix) enabled Cycles tests (see here for some test results). Keep in mind that RTX doesn't improve speed on all aspects/calculations in a render. So when using the 1080 + 2080, their should be speed improvements reflected for those calculations that can't take advantage of RTX, or at least it makes sense to me. Also keep in mind some scenes will show greater speed improvements with RTX, depending on what shaders/effects are used in the scene, since RTX doesn't accelerate everything.

Thanks for taking the time to test and post your results. Poser 11.3 is beginning to look quite interesting. If I weren't on a tight budget, I'd for sure be upgrading just to play. I hope there are more posts/threads in the forum that show exactly what can be done with P11 so those of us who haven't upgraded yet can evaluate it better.

I'm using the first posted beta version of 11.3

Thank you, Nails60 - good to confirm that you're on the same version.

A shame that no one can run 11.1 anymore - I would have been interested to see the 1080ti performance before the 11.2 update.

Dim_Reaper posted at 8:45PM Mon, 17 February 2020 - #4380812

Thank you, Nails60 - good to confirm that you're on the same version.

A shame that no one can run 11.1 anymore - I would have been interested to see the 1080ti performance before the 11.2 update.

From the brief play I had the 1080ti was blinding and much faster than rendering with the CPU, as you would expect but at the time it would crash the render if I went over the 11Gig memory on board. Now the 1080ti is crippled with the render often not as fast as the CPU and that is with the CPU running 32 threads. Ironically I can now run renders over the 11Gig memory but I never do as I prefer to use the CPU as is is often as fast if not better.