GTX 580 new fan behavior

Thu Mar 28, 2013 1:31 pm

I've noticed, my two GTX 580's fans seem to crank up as soon as I fire DAZ Studio since I installed DAZ Octane renderer yesterday. I had a play with the Poser Octane plugin before and the fans don't start heavy work until you start to rendering and they will get quiet as soon as you close the render window. Is there a reason for the fans to crank up even when I'm not rendering in DAZ Studio?

Thu Mar 28, 2013 1:40 pm

My fan speeds act exactly the same as the standalone.

Perhaps a quick test using the standalone as a comparison?

t_3 · Thu Mar 28, 2013 1:50 pm

SimonWM wrote:I've noticed, my two GTX 580's fans seem to crank up as soon as I fire DAZ Studio since I installed DAZ Octane renderer yesterday. I had a play with the Poser Octane plugin before and the fans don't start heavy work until you start to rendering and they will get quiet as soon as you close the render window. Is there a reason for the fans to crank up even when I'm not rendering in DAZ Studio?

yes there is: as soon as the plugin initializes octane (and it needs to do this right @ start), the cards will go out of low power states. they won't do something else, i.e. if you check the gpu utilization, it is still zero. unfortunately this needs to be changed by otoy (if at all possible).

what you can do, if you plan to work in ds for some time without using the plugin, you can untick all your gpus in the system tab, this should allow them to enter low power state again (not yet tested).

note: there seems to be differences in how fans are controlled - if this is done by temperatures only, there shouldn't be any much difference, since the temperature of the gpu don't change that much. if you like to have better control about fan speeds, best is get yourself msi afterburner http://event.msi.com/vga/afterburner/ and set a speed curve that maintains low speed on lower temps and just enough speed to keep the gpus below ~85° while rendering...

Thu Mar 28, 2013 1:55 pm

Isotemod wrote:My fan speeds act exactly the same as the standalone.

Perhaps a quick test using the standalone as a comparison?

Since I'm on air cooling for my motherboard and I'm using Asus AI Suite to monitor my temperatures and control my fans I haven't installed Precision X which will give me the fan speeds for the GTX 580's. Reason is that Precision X and AI Suite conflict one with the other. But I'm going by fan noise and DAZ Studio definitely jumpstarts the fans on launch since I installed the Octane plugin.

Thu Mar 28, 2013 1:59 pm

t_3 wrote:
SimonWM wrote:I've noticed, my two GTX 580's fans seem to crank up as soon as I fire DAZ Studio since I installed DAZ Octane renderer yesterday. I had a play with the Poser Octane plugin before and the fans don't start heavy work until you start to rendering and they will get quiet as soon as you close the render window. Is there a reason for the fans to crank up even when I'm not rendering in DAZ Studio?
yes there is: as soon as the plugin initializes octane (and it needs to do this right @ start), the cards will go out of low power states. they won't do something else, i.e. if you check the gpu utilization, it is still zero. unfortunately this needs to be changed by otoy (if at all possible).

what you can do, if you plan to work in ds for some time without using the plugin, you can untick all your gpus in the system tab, this should allow them to enter low power state again (not yet tested).

note: there seems to be differences in how fans are controlled - if this is done by temperatures only, there shouldn't be any much difference, since the temperature of the gpu don't change that much. if you like to have better control about fan speeds, best is get yourself msi afterburner http://event.msi.com/vga/afterburner/ and set a speed curve that maintains low speed on lower temps and just enough speed to keep the gpus below ~85° while rendering...

I'll try unticking the gpus, this seems like a good solution.

t_3 · Thu Mar 28, 2013 2:04 pm

SimonWM wrote:I'll try unticking the gpus, this seems like a good solution.

pls, let me know if this works four you; might need a minute or two until the gpu(s) enter low power state again. might make sense to create an action/button somewhere to do that (or maybe doing it automatic)...

Thu Mar 28, 2013 2:33 pm

Unticking the GPUS on DAZ Studio didn't work, fans keep the noise going. I also notice that if I untick them they will be ticked the next time I fire Studio. I haven't tried unticking them in the Octane standalone though.

t_3 · Thu Mar 28, 2013 3:06 pm

SimonWM wrote:Unticking the GPUS on DAZ Studio didn't work, fans keep the noise going. I also notice that if I untick them they will be ticked the next time I fire Studio. I haven't tried unticking them in the Octane standalone though.

checked it also, and here it works. although i have the gpus not connected to any display, so this might be different behavior.
(dumb question in addition: did you click "apply config"?)

but it seems that octane activates at least one gpu on startup, even if the last saved config was zero gpus, so this won't work anyway. i currently can only recommend tuning fan speed progression with msi afterburner (or the like), and apart from that hope that otoy changes octanes' behavior. imo this was already mentioned with other plugins also, means there is some demand. i don't expect to see this having high priority for them though...

Thu Mar 28, 2013 3:28 pm

t_3 wrote:
SimonWM wrote:Unticking the GPUS on DAZ Studio didn't work, fans keep the noise going. I also notice that if I untick them they will be ticked the next time I fire Studio. I haven't tried unticking them in the Octane standalone though.
checked it also, and here it works. although i have the gpus not connected to any display, so this might be different behavior.
(dumb question in addition: did you click "apply config"?)

but it seems that octane activates at least one gpu on startup, even if the last saved config was zero gpus, so this won't work anyway. i currently can only recommend tuning fan speed progression with msi afterburner (or the like), and apart from that hope that otoy changes octanes' behavior. imo this was already mentioned with other plugins also, means there is some demand. i don't expect to see this having high priority for them though...

Doh! I missed the "apply config" step. Now that I tried it correctly it does seems to stop the fan noise. When I reopen DAZ Studio one of the GTX 580's comes back ticked so it seems the plugin wants to always have one GPU ticked by default. I think this solves my problem. Thank you, T3.

t_3 · Thu Mar 28, 2013 3:38 pm

SimonWM wrote:Doh! I missed the "apply config" step. Now that I tried it correctly it does seems to stop the fan noise. When I reopen DAZ Studio one of the GTX 580's comes back ticked so it seems the plugin wants to always have one GPU ticked by default. I think this solves my problem. Thank you, T3.

might be possible to overcome octanes' urge to have at least one gpu by saving and applying this setting explicitly in the plugin settings (currently this relys on octane itself)...