Back on Track (Patreon)

Hello everyone,

Since my old computer completely died, I’ve been having a harder time getting things back on track — which you’ve probably already noticed from the recent uploads.

My new render beast has been a real headache from the start. First, I was dealing with frequent crashes. Then the system was unbelievably loud, even under light load, with the fans running like a turbine right next to me. And once those issues were finally resolved, I ran into an even bigger problem: poor image quality in the areas where quality matters most, combined with extremely long render times. No matter which settings I changed or which drivers I tested, the results were simply not where they needed to be.

That was especially frustrating because I’m now working with very modern hardware that should be delivering excellent results in far less time. To be honest, I haven’t been happy with the quality of the images I’ve released over the past two weeks, and I take that seriously. I want my work to meet a high standard, and I want to achieve that without relying on AI - even though I may experiment with it at some point.

After a lot of troubleshooting, I finally found the likely cause in a forum post: DAZ Studio is currently not compatible with the GeForce 5090. That was a pretty rough thing to find out.

Thankfully, DAZ does offer a beta version that is supposed to support the newer GeForce cards.

So I downloaded it, reinstalled everything from scratch, and ran a direct comparison test using an image from the comic Emily.

It was the exact same image in both cases.

With the old setup, I tried rendering it at only 620 × 877 px, and the result was still extremely noisy. After 4 hours, I stopped the render. The system was incredibly loud the entire time, the fans were running at full speed, and the noise alone was enough to give me a headache.

With the new DAZ beta version, I rendered that same image again in 4K at 2480 × 3508 px, which is my normal working resolution. This time, the system was so quiet that I had to check more than once to make sure it was even still running. And after just 15 minutes, the image was fully rendered at that quality.

That difference is huge.

So I’m hopeful that I can now return to the level of quality I expect from my own work and get back to uploading the usual comic releases on a regular schedule. Thank you for your patience and support.

Amaz2k12