Sorry if I missed this earlier in the thread, but if your "scene memory requirements" exceed your available GPU RAM (VRAM) that will also kill your performance.

As Kelleytoons suggested, things like reflections and transparency will slow things down (especially for iClone) and lots of textures hurt performance in addition to potentially consuming memory if they are large textures (iClone simply isn't very efficient with them).  Do you have a lot of characters (which also tends to add a lot of textures).

Will Super Sampling settings have much effect?  It's a judgement call if it is worth the extra rendering time or not.  Do a 2 or 5-second test with zero super sampling, 2x, 3x etc.  Then you can make an informed decision about how much rendering time is worth any improvement you do (or do not) see.

I have a GTX 1080 (yep, getting old).  Mostly it performs okay, but I have a few scenes where it absolutely crawls like a wounded snail.  Sometimes you just have to deal with it.

ONE OTHER SUGGESITON - You can turn of almost all "visual stuff" for initial renders if you need to look at the animation in terms of timing, speed, and "acting" and when you are happy with the basics then you can turn on all the eye candy.  I had spending 12+ hours rendering a rough draft multiple times.

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iClone 7... Character Creator... Substance Designer/Painter... Blender... Audacity...
Desktop (homebuilt) - Windows 10, Ryzen 9 3900x CPU, GTX 1080 GPU (8GB), 32GB RAM, Asus X570 Pro motherboard, 2TB SSD, terabytes of disk space, dual  monitors.
Laptop - Windows 10, MSI GS63VR STEALTH-252, 16GB RAM, GTX 1060 (6GB), 256GB SSD and 1TB HDD

Super-sampling increases the resolution temporarily and then downsamples by averaging or something similar.  This is extremely slow.
Suppose you are rendering to a final size of 1000 x 1000 (round numbers to keep it simple) and suppose you are doing 3x3 supersampling.  Then iClone actually renders a 3000 x 3000 image, which is 9 times the computation.  To produce your final 1000 x 1000 render it combines every 3x3 block of pixels in that high-resolution render into a single pixel in the final render.  The primary effect of this is to reduce jagged edges in sharp transitions.  Think of it in one dimension.  Suppose you have a sharp edge transitioning from 0 to 90.  Without supersampling the final image would look like this:
...0 0 0 90 90 90...
With supersampling 2x2, this same row would look like this:
...0 0 0 0 0 90 90 90 90 90...
If we average pairs to get the final render, we get this smoother transition:
...0 0 45 90 90...
If you draw a picture expanding this to two dimensions (too complex for this message) you will see that 'staircase' depiction of diagonal lines is greatly reduced.
So supersampling is only helpful in an image that has sharp tone/color transitions along a diagonal.
Tim

That seems too long should be prob 4-6 hours ive never used gaming cards for 3d i have 3 cards 2 rtx 4000 $800 1 rtx a6000 $5k with everything maxed out super sampling with multiple particle effects i think it it takes about 2 hours to render 15500 frames
just for reference ..even with these cards video effects in vegas or other video editors can take 6 hours on a 4-6 min clip.  Before these cards i had 3 nvidia m4000 and got decent speeds on other 3d apps..Im coming from a poser daz
world is hobbyist so everything is faster in these apps..

example this took about 6 hours with 2 filters and an audio track in vegas  

this took 2 hours in Iclone to render longer than i spent on the test project

The number of transistors and computing power is irrelevant here. Architecture what matters. It probably renders faster with ray tracing (with Iray for instance), where Computing counter should be looked at.
Real-time render has different bases and you centrally cannot compare it with rendering 2D in video editors.
And 1080ti according to bench has slightly faster overall 3D speed: https://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Nvidia-RTX-3060-Ti-vs-Nvidia-GTX-1080-Ti/4090vs3918
Everyone wishes iClone render faster. But it is what it is. Hopefully IC8 would have some better specs, although I doubt.

The 1080ti has 3GB more VRAM, but that's its only advantage, the processing speed of the 3060 ti (With 17.4 billion transistors) is much faster than the 1080ti.
That's why the 3060 ti should render faster.
I do not have an Onboard graphics card as I am using an AMD processor.

But the problem here is different.
In this test we did, the GPU's power became insignificant as it didn't even use 10% of the GPU.
The problem is that the program itself does this very slowly and cannot fully use the hardware to speed up.
For this reason, there is little difference between Kelleytoons' test result with the 3090.
I don't even think that difference is due to GPU.

Actually, this is a serious problem.
Perhaps there is a restriction for the program to fully use the hardware to meet the Recommended hardware requirements (Video Memory: 2GB RAM).
I rendered a 10-minute video in 10 seconds with the video editing program.
The problem is that iClone itself does this very slowly.
I don't know if there is a setting anywhere in the program to speed this up, I searched but couldn't find it, it's not using my hardware at all.

Is it normal for it to render a 30 second blank project (I also deleted the lights) in 4 - 8 minutes?
According to the test results, I realized that the rendering time was not long for me alone.

You said that the Super Sampling option is a feature that does anti-aliasing of objects.
Then can you tell what object it is applying to in an empty scene?

What I mean to say is that having a powerful GPU can help you a lot in the working scene, but once you tick the super sampling box while rendering, your GPU's being too powerful becomes irrelevant.
The program renders at a constant speed.

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https://www.youtube.com/yepkoo
https://dev.epicgames.com/community/profile/bxvo/Yepkoo#learning

But it would ray-trace render almost 5 times faster.

Interesting that my 3090 isn't much faster - around 4 minutes versus your 6 minutes.

Then again, I'm not in the habit of rendering 10 minute projects at one pass (I've created such things in multiple stages).

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Alienware Aurora R16, Win 11, i9-149000KF, 3.20GHz CPU, 64GB RAM, RTX 4090 (24GB), Samsung 870 Pro 8TB, Gen3 MVNe M-2 SSD, 4TBx2, 39" Alienware Widescreen Monitor
Mike "ex-genius" Kelley

Ahh, I just noticed you have 3060TI..
On my PC empty project with SSx3, 30FPS 1920x1080 renders for 6:08 min with normal viewport and 5:30 with Full Screen. CPU: 25%, GPU:20%
Given that 1080ti is slightly faster than 3060ti, your specs is probably within the margin.

And I don't think Intel (or whichever you have on-board), would even allow to open iClone... I might be mistaken though, cause I never tried that :)

Do you have more than one GPU? (A laptop will have onboard graphics and you need to specifically select the GPU or it will be used instead).

I guess even a desktop can have onboard graphics - make sure your GPU is what iClone is using (there are instructions on how to do this but I have no idea where - Mr. G will know).

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Alienware Aurora R16, Win 11, i9-149000KF, 3.20GHz CPU, 64GB RAM, RTX 4090 (24GB), Samsung 870 Pro 8TB, Gen3 MVNe M-2 SSD, 4TBx2, 39" Alienware Widescreen Monitor
Mike "ex-genius" Kelley

I rendered an empty project to see if it was rendering slowly due to the content.
An empty 30-second project took 8 minutes to render.
If I make this empty project for 10 minutes, rendering will take 3 hours.
Isn't that interesting?
The other interesting thing is that iClone doesn't use my graphics card or processor at all.
All hardware of my computer (CPU, Graphics card, Disk, Ram) are all at minimum level.
The iC7 cache folder is in the m2 disk.
The program itself is running slow and not using my computer hardware.
Tried everything, it never speeds up unless I turn off Super Sampling.


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