Plan. Review. Restore.
VRAM Budget Advisor turns estimated texture and mesh costs into a plan you can review before changing your scene. Set a graphics-card budget, leave a reserve for Iray and other GPU use, protect important assets, then inspect the proposed reductions. Keep recovery records for the changes you apply and check what a specific render actually completed.
PLAN AROUND YOUR BUDGET
- Choose a card budget and an adjustable Iray/OS reserve.
- Review half-size or quarter-size supported texture copies and individual Render SubD changes, with estimated savings and quality-risk notes.
- Count shared source-image savings once. A protected asset keeps its shared source image at its original resolution.
- See targets that available changes cannot reach and costs the scan cannot cover. Applying a partial plan or incomplete coverage requires explicit opt-in.
KEEP IMPORTANT DETAIL IN YOUR CONTROL
- Protect source images in Textures or nodes/assets through the available protection controls. Review topology and Render SubD in Geometry.
- Opacity, normal and detail maps are protected by default. Higher-risk map reductions require an explicit choice.
- Reduced copies are saved separately as PNGs; original texture files are preserved. Reducing dimensions or SubD can still change visible detail.
RESTORE RECORDED CHANGES AFTER SAVE AND REOPEN
- Named Saved Plans record original texture assignments, gamma, authored numeric/color values and Render SubD before applying a reviewed plan.
- Restore those recorded fields after save/reopen using persisted node identities.
- Preserve conflicting later edits and report missing originals, changed owners or ambiguous identities instead of guessing or overwriting them.
- Keep original assets, generated image copies and recovery data available. Saved Plans is not a full scene backup; hidden identity metadata remains.
VERIFY ONE REAL RENDER
- Run DAZ's current render using its current size, quality and destination.
- Review native completion and positive logged GPU sample contribution, with CPU-only rendering, fallback, memory errors and incomplete evidence kept distinct.
- Retain historical render records. Check recorded inputs performs a fresh, dated comparison of the represented inputs; coverage gaps remain visible.
- Learn unambiguous direct-source image formats from a clean completed render to refine part of the estimate. Layered composites are excluded.
- Read optional NVIDIA device-wide memory snapshots and save a text report.
A PREPARED-SCENE EXAMPLE, WITH CLEAR LIMITS
Tested on 2026-10-24 in DAZ Studio 6.25.2026.14722 with an RTX 5060 and mixed CPU + GPU devices. The clothed Genesis 9 portrait scene contained 501 nodes. All seven 576 x 1024, 512-sample renders completed with positive logged GPU contribution. This does not guarantee that another render will fit.
External device-wide sampling found one controlled pair with a 71 MiB lower baseline-adjusted memory excursion and a 103 MiB lower sampled device maximum. This is one observation. Isolated scene allocation and repeatable savings are not established; other applications affect device use. The memory observation came from a separate controlled pair, not the displayed image-comparison pair.
The reviewed partial plan reduced 37 textures from 1536 to 768 px without SubD changes. Estimated model cost changed from 296.37 to 268.62 MiB: 27.75 MiB, or 9.36%. This estimate is separate from the device measurement. The requested 20% model reduction was not reached and coverage was incomplete.
Apply took 3m31.5s. A fresh-process restore recovered all 91 recorded fields in 10.4s with no reported errors or conflicts. This verifies those recorded fields, not full scene equivalence. At the tested framing, appearance was very similar overall, with subtle clothing-detail changes. Reduction is not lossless, and no render speedup is claimed. Timings and results vary by scene and system.
Before measurement, the baseline had already been prepared at effective Render SubD 1, with 61 texture sources capped at 1536 px and eight LIE composites flattened. Those preparation changes are excluded from Advisor savings. The baseline already rendered successfully; this is not a failed-scene rescue claim.
EVERYDAY ACCESS AND INSTALLATION
Choose either installation method; both contain the same product files.
Manual: extract the Scripts folder into a mapped DAZ content library.
DIM: install the DIM ZIP through DAZ Install Manager.
In Content Library, browse DAZ Studio Formats > your library > Scripts > VRAM Budget Advisor and run Install Scripts Menu once. Then open the top menu:
Scripts > VRAM Budget Advisor
Normal first launch also adds the shortcut. Repeat setup after moving the library or for another DAZ version/profile. Remove Scripts Menu removes only this product's menu shortcut and retains product files and scene dependencies.
REQUIREMENTS AND VALIDATION SCOPE
- Windows; DAZ Studio 4.24 / 6.25 version families; NVIDIA Iray workflow.
- Current native workflow and render benchmark: DAZ 6.25.2026.14722.
- The current encrypted script passed limited DAZ 4.24.0.4 compatibility controls. Its full budget/apply/save/reopen/restore/render workflow has not been validated on DAZ 4 for this exact revision. Current full-workflow validation is limited to DAZ 6.
- No additional plugin, Mad Librarian or Affection installation is required.
- nvidia-smi is required only for optional NVIDIA memory snapshots. Manual budgets and estimates work without it. Card capacities are not added together.
SUPPORTED REDUCTIONS AND IMPORTANT LIMITS
Texture reductions support verified 8-bit PNG/JPEG/BMP sources. HDR/EXR, layered/LIE, renderer/environment and unsupported-precision sources stay unchanged. Unresolved owners and exact native property objects shared by multiple node owners are retained. Ordinary separate properties sharing one image file are supported.
Dimensions, source formats, compression, mip allowances and mesh models are estimates, not Iray's total GPU allocation. Instances, displacement, procedural or strand hair, generated/UDIM images, compositing and render buffers can add costs outside that model. Keep headroom for these costs and other applications.
A completed render result applies to that render. A small test cannot prove a larger render will fit. Built-in GPU snapshots include other applications and are neither peak memory nor memory allocated by this scene. External benchmark sampling is separate from the product's optional snapshots.
Inspect close-ups after applying changes. Keep original images, generated copies and recovery journals. Recovery is local to the DAZ user/profile folder; copying a scene alone does not copy its recovery data. Restore and resave every affected scene, or retain its dependencies, before deleting generated files or journals.
INCLUDED
- One encrypted standalone advisor script.
- Install Scripts Menu and Remove Scripts Menu helpers, icons and ReadMe.
- Manual-install ZIP and DAZ Install Manager ZIP; choose one method.
- Example scenes, characters, third-party assets and graphics-card hardware shown in the gallery are not included.
ABOUT THE GALLERY
UI panels use actual current interface captures from a small example scene; they do not show the populated benchmark state. Empty Saved Plans and Verify Render examples are labelled.
Support: support@affection-x.com. Include product version, your full DAZ version and the action/error details. Send requested logs to support@affection-x.com.
