External GPU box for Daz?

[MrBree]

I'm looking to upgrade my personal laptop shortly.

I'm half way considering getting an external GPU box to work with it so I could tinker with DAZ (and hopefully proceed to make my own game).

While I do understand that a workstation class desktop would be a more ideal situation to do rendering, a laptop is an absolute requirement for my personal needs. So an external GPU would be an ideal compromise.

But that is if it works. Is this even a reasonable option?

 

[polywog]

 

[MrBree]

View attachment 145683

Nice picture. But in my case the limiting factor would be the laptop and the connection to the box since it still would be controlled by the laptop.

So I'm not sure how that helps answer the question.

 

[trevmac789]

View attachment 145683

Probably be more money to make in bitcoin with that rig.

 

[Bip]

@MrBree
Don't take my words at face value, it's more a reflection that I did when I thought about it.
First, you'll need a Thunderbolt 3 connection. Very few PCs have them, the best prepared for that are the Mac. But Nvidia and Mac... This is clearly not an out-of-the-box thing.
Then you will need a good dose of RAM. 16GB is the bare minimum on Mac, 32GB will still be more comfortable. And do not expect to do much with less than 1TB of hard drive. With Apple's all-welded policy, you will not be able to increase your configuration later and it's overpriced.
For PC, it's nearly the same, except maybe for the Nvidia thing.

Add to that the cost of a box and the price explodes. For what? For a configuration that will be unable to cool properly and, at best, drastically limiting the CPU and perhaps even the GPU if the ventilation of the box is not perfect.

For me, this solution can eventually be a pis-aller for occasional use, but no more. Personally, I am moving towards a very good desktop solution for the same price, keeping my 2012 Mac laptop which is still very good.

 

[MrBree]

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Thank you for the response. To clarify, for me this is not an either/or situation. I need a decent laptop for other reasons. So my choice is to either have a laptop with some bump-ups and externals as a compromise, or both a laptop and desktop. In theory doing it once would save money. (High RAM is already given for me. HDs can be external, so that just leaves the GPU.) I'm unfortunately not capable/willing to spend extra $$ for a separate desktop at this time if I am just using it for rendering purposes. I'd have to explore that option more to make it viable if an eGPU is a no-go.

I was indeed thinking of getting a Mac laptop (yeah, I know among these circles that is hearsay. But that's what I need). That would cover the Thunderbolt concern, but since you mentioned Nvidia, that is an issue.

I completely forgot the fact that eGPU support for Nvidia cards is completely missing on the Mac. Given that DAZ pretty much requires Nvidia, that becomes a no go. A brief look shows it is still possible, just unofficially. Might still be doable, but your point definitely stands.

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But are you also saying that a PC Thunderbolt class laptop would still be problematic given the CPU stress? Does the rendering stress just the GPU (which would be accommodated by the external box) or the CPU as well?

 

[Bip]

Yes, you can have a Nvidia card working on a Mac, but there're flaws and the system may crash (and a Kernel Panic is not better than a blue screen :closedeyesmile.

The CPU stress is more during the scene creation. I have a GT650M, then for me the stress is always x'D, but the scene creation clearly stress an i7 2,6GHz / 16GB / 1TB SSD, even on Mac OS and I get some lags on medium sized scenes.

The creation of this scene was enough to really stress the CPU and have lags.... And I don't speak about the render :cryingface: With a good cooling system, I'm sure it would be easier...

Then if it's just to play with Daz, it should be better than well, but if you want to start creating a game, I'm really not sure it will be a good solution.

 

[Rich]

The other thing you have to realize is that DS is just better supported on the PC than on the Mac. Not that the base Studio won't run on a Mac, but there are plenty of plug-ins that are "PC only." In addition, you'll probably be able to get more processing power for your buck with a PC than with a Mac. (i.e. more cores, etc.)

Mind you, I'm a Mac user professionally, so I'm not an "anti-Apple-fanboy" in any way, shape or form. But dollar for dollar, Windows-based hardware outperforms Apple's. (By intention - they focus on things other than raw performance, while there are plenty of companies producing Windows machines that choose to make that their "thing.")

 

[MrBree]

The Mac vs. PC debate is irrelevant to me. Every tool has its place. But that does mean when evaluating doing a new task, I need to check to see how well the tools I already have (and need) fit into that use case. Or if I have to get entirely new tools to fit this usage. In most cases 'use what you have' is the best solution even with compromises.

In my case, I could live with a Hackintosh-type PC laptop if necessary, but I do need that portability. Which was why I asked the question about external GPUs.

If a laptop isn't really viable for DAZ even with that, I would have to evaluate at what point getting entirely separate and new tools would be advisable when I am still starting off with doing this.

I get that a PC Desktop is strongly encouraged and appreciate that input. I'm just trying to figure out if it would be viable to avoid going all out just yet.

 

[Rich]

Of course. Obviously, with the "external GPU" approach, there are obviously two components - the GPU itself and the external cage. If you went with this approach, and then later it wasn't ideal or didn't work out, in theory the "wasted" money is for the cage - you'd be able to put the GPU in another box. So I guess it comes down to how willing you are to risk that particular chunk of change that you'd be able to get the combination working with your Mac.

"According to the Internet" (large grain of salt) it can be made to work. And who knows - Apple might finally decide to drag themselves into the modern world and support NVidia... LOL

 

[8873672413434]

I mean.. If you're willing to pay the price for that GPU Box (Going of UKs Currency here) - You could probably build a PC or get a second hand PC with decent specs as a starting point. Then if you start building an audience you can start upgrading or buy a whole new rig. I find DS is miles more optimized for PC than it is for Laptop.

 

[OhWee]

Might as well weigh in here.

So, I have an MSI laptop with an 18.4" screen. I wouldn't consider it as a laptop, more of a desktop replacement. The two power bricks are huge, and the battery life sucks. Plus it's heavy... the backlit mechanical keyboard makes me very happy though, although I'd prefer a mechanical 10 key as opposed to repurposing the trackpad as a 10 key...

It has dual GTX 1080s, which combined are about 20-30% faster than a single 1080 Ti. And it has a Thunderbolt 3 port.

I've been considering a TBolt 3 enclosure as an option. Supposedly you can daisy chain TBolt 3 devices, but I'm not seeing a lot of 'real world' usage reports on this as far as GPUs are concerned. And if you don't mind spending a LOT of money, there are dual GPU enclosures. We are talking thousands of dollars, just for the external box.

As for a single GPU solution, most of the boxes I've looked at are over $300, and of course there's the issue of finding an external box with sufficient power to comfortably run say a 1080 Ti. Plus, that box would need a wall socket somewhere...

The upside is that rendering on an external box means you aren't baking the insides of your laptop with rendering. As for how well these works, again I haven't seen a lot of feedback on this via google searches. I'm sure there are usage cases out there, but I haven't stumbled across the 'yeah I render all the time with an external GPU TBolt box with Daz' post as of yet.

There are some fairly sweet 17" gaming laptops that might do OK with rendering, that have one and sometimes two GTX 1080s (or lesser options like the 1070). They can get rather pricey though. Rendering with an internal GPU sucks battery life, so keep that in mind.

The reason I'm strongly considering an external enclosure for the GPU is VRAM. After the Windows 10 VRAM tax, I only have 6.4 GB available for scenes, which I seem to be able to max out fairly often. I do a lot of renders with multiple (say 4+) characters, which is enough to fill the VRAM and kick me to CPU only often enough. A 1080 Ti has 11 GB of VRAM (so that'd be 9 GB of VRAM available after the VRAM tax). Also that new Nvidia Pro 24 GB card for $2300 that was announced in the last few weeks is looking more and more attractive, if I don't end up doing a remote desktop build.

Supposedly we have some RTX 20xx mobile GPUs in the pipeline, but it may be several months before laptops with those hit the market.

So, I'm intrigued with this topic as well, and would love to see 'real usage' examples using an external GPU with performance benchmarks using Daz Iray, as opposed to just 'yeah it's possible' posts...

 

[8873672413434]

Might as well weigh in here.

So, I have an MSI laptop with an 18.4" screen. I wouldn't consider it as a laptop, more of a desktop replacement. The two power bricks are huge, and the battery life sucks. Plus it's heavy... the backlit mechanical keyboard makes me very happy though, although I'd prefer a mechanical 10 key as opposed to repurposing the trackpad as a 10 key...

It has dual GTX 1080s, which combined are about 20-30% faster than a single 1080 Ti. And it has a Thunderbolt 3 port.

I've been considering a TBolt 3 enclosure as an option. Supposedly you can daisy chain TBolt 3 devices, but I'm not seeing a lot of 'real world' usage reports on this as far as GPUs are concerned. And if you don't mind spending a LOT of money, there are dual GPU enclosures. We are talking thousands of dollars, just for the external box.

As for a single GPU solution, most of the boxes I've looked at are over $300, and of course there's the issue of finding an external box with sufficient power to comfortably run say a 1080 Ti. Plus, that box would need a wall socket somewhere...

The upside is that rendering on an external box means you aren't baking the insides of your laptop with rendering. As for how well these works, again I haven't seen a lot of feedback on this via google searches. I'm sure there are usage cases out there, but I haven't stumbled across the 'yeah I render all the time with an external GPU TBolt box with Daz' post as of yet.

There are some fairly sweet 17" gaming laptops that might do OK with rendering, that have one and sometimes two GTX 1080s (or lesser options like the 1070). They can get rather pricey though. Rendering with an internal GPU sucks battery life, so keep that in mind.

The reason I'm strongly considering an external enclosure for the GPU is VRAM. After the Windows 10 VRAM tax, I only have 6.4 GB available for scenes, which I seem to be able to max out fairly often. I do a lot of renders with multiple (say 4+) characters, which is enough to fill the VRAM and kick me to CPU only often enough. A 1080 Ti has 11 GB of VRAM (so that'd be 9 GB of VRAM available after the VRAM tax). Also that 24 GB card for $2300 that was announced in the last few weeks is looking more and more attractive, if I don't end up doing a remote desktop build.

Supposedly we have some RTX 20xx mobile GPUs in the pipeline, but it may be several months before laptops with those hit the market.

So, I'm intrigued with this topic as well, and would love to see 'real usage' examples using an external GPU with performance benchmarks using Daz Iray, as opposed to just 'yeah it's possible' posts...

That sounds like a beast of a Laptop in all fairness.

There's also the NVidia Tesla that's just been released, though again.. It's super pricey, $11,000 pricey.

Did you not find anything on the DAZ Forums? As surely someone must have used or at least tested it and given their opinion.

 

[OhWee]

I found this website just now using Google, which might be helpful for research at least.

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It was posted up in the Daz3D forum. There are a couple of threads about the subject, but no actual usage cases in those Daz forum threads as far as I've seen so far.

 

[MrBree]

I want to thank everyone for their response. I did a little more research on the topic based on the suggestions here, and wanted to provide an update since there seemed to be interest in the answers.

I dug through both the Daz3D and egpu.io forums for a bit ( thanks for the suggestions @OhWee !)

I found plenty of general comments about using Daz on laptops and a few with egpus but very few of them said anything at all about performance and/or impact on the laptop. (and yes, I'm a mac user but I also looked for info on laptops in general.. )

The most specific seemed here:
(not sure how to link to a specific comment at the daz3d forums... might have to scroll? )

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I have a MacBook 15" Mid-2012 with 2.6ghz i7, 16gb of RAM, a 2tb SSD and a GeForce 650M with 1gb of RAM. I also have an external monitor setup so I can have two screens working at the same time
.....
I was blown away. The CPU and the 650M would take 3 hours. The 1050 ti took 16 minutes!!! That's over a 11x improvement!!!

Here is the log info:

GeForce GTX 1050 ti
2018-06-19 17:51:22.686 Finished Rendering
2018-06-19 17:51:23.101 Total Rendering Time: 16 minutes 48.74 seconds

MacBook Pro 2.6ghz CPU
2018-06-19 22:39:28.016 Finished Rendering
2018-06-19 22:39:28.458 Total Rendering Time: 2 hours 56 minutes 37.48 seconds

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some guy was able to get a 2013 Macbook pro (with a Thunderbolt 2 port.... ) working fine. He posted a shot of him using the BMW blender test

Internal gpu: 13:53.64
1080 Ti eGPU: 2:17.19

but he does say:

5) And one last thing, I dont know if its necessary but I'm sured its helpful. When you game or render, your macbook is overheating a lot, it always does even when I used to render on CPU. I just bought a not so expensive cooling pad, and now computer sits on it. Again, I don't know if its needed, but just touching mac when I render scares me

That's perhaps not a good sign...

Some other benchmarks here:

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And they have a build guide table of user submitted builds:

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So as far as I can tell, it is perfectly doable. Still not sure about advisable though.
Do these benchmark times seem any good? That makes a significant difference.

So one lassstt question for excellent folks --- how much to budget for a desktop would make the difference "eh, I can do this hack for now", and "Forget it, it's worth it". So what type of budget would you usually have to invest in a (starter) rendering desktop? I assumed that the minimum would be at least 1 to 1.5k.

 

[OhWee]

That Blender test took 2 hours? Wow! And 13 hours without the external box?!?

Poor laptop... getting baked for 13 hours...

Anyways, back on point, we were discussing some desktop builds in another thread. $1,500 to $2,300 seems like a good place for a decent build which includes a GTX 1080 Ti, 16 GB of ram, an SSD/large HDD combo (Daz loves to suck up storage space as you collect assets and make scenes), and an 8 core processor. Actually, you can manage a 16 core 1950x Threadripper build at the high end of that range. The 16 cores are nice for those times when you are working with that large scene that goes CPU only...

You may be able to put together/find a box for less. The biggies are, as has been suggested in other threads, 16 GB of ram and preferably an Nvidia card with at least 8 GB of VRAM (6 GB on a really tight budget). The less VRAM, the more CPU only Iray renders that you may see. Of course, if you are doing the 3Delight thing, then the graphics card isn't nearly as important.

If you are rendering 1 or 2 characters without backgrounds (and overlaying them ingame over a background images), then you can get buy with less VRAM, plus your render will generally go much faster, since you aren't also rendering tables, etc. along with the characters.

There are some higher end gaming laptops in that $1500-$2300 range as well. They max out at GTX 1080s though (only 8 GB of VRAM, better than nothing...). I keep hoping for a 1080 Ti mobile card, but so far that hasn't happened. Going forward, a 2080 Ti mobile would be nice to see.

Note that there ARE workstation class notebooks out there with Nvidia Quadro graphics, but they are pricey (Say around the $5000 range), and while the P5200 has 16 GB of VRAM, it's slower than a 1080 Ti...

 

[FranceToast]

So one lassstt question for excellent folks --- how much to budget for a desktop would make the difference "eh, I can do this hack for now", and "Forget it, it's worth it". So what type of budget would you usually have to invest in a (starter) rendering desktop? I assumed that the minimum would be at least 1 to 1.5k.

I used

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to build my first gaming PC, and browsed a lot of the completed builds to get some idea what I wanted/within my price range-it might give you some idea. One tricky part though-I did a quick perusal/search of systems around $1,500-$1,700 (your price guess), and had a 1080Ti (which is top of the line until later this month), and while there are a lot of builds at this price point, they almost all without exception do not include the price of the...1080Ti...lol, I guess the thinking is they already had it on hand, or something? I mean, the video card is probably the most important component for almost any build there. Anyways, it is fun (and risk free) to try to put together a system here.

Sympathize with the desire to keep on the Mac-I love mine (except for gaming)

 

[caLTD]

Ok this is
No replacement for displacement
situation.

Going MAC route cost you lot. And you need RAW POWER, this isn't best os problem, this isn't mobility problem, this isn't best device problem.

This is plain how much raw CPU/GPU power for your money.

If you going to buy or configure laptop for this kind of operation you misspend your budged. Don't do it. Later or sooner you will regret it.

Buy a nice PC do it your render here. you can buy used intel (hp / dell) workstations then buy a TI grade GFX card.

And if you success in game development you can build your dream MAC (or what ever) setup you want.

 

[Perverteer]

Thought I'd chime in, as I own an eGPU and I render my VN Sisterly Lust on it.

I started out doing 3Delight renders with an older MacBook Pro, which weren't great, but the best I could do at the time. It was mid-range by Apple's standards when I bought it, low-range when I started rendering on it.

Because I had the funds from my Patreon account and some of my own money I was able to buy a GPU enclosure (Asus ROG XG Station) and a card (Titan Xp). I was able to hook it up to laptop using a Thunderbolt 2 to 3 adapter and with one of the scripts posted on egpu.io it worked! There are downsides, apart from needing the script. I wasn't able to upgrade the firmware of the eGPU for example, in the case of the ROG this can only done via Windows using a Thunderbolt 3 cable. Also, you can't hot-unplug the enclosure, something which is possible with Radeon cards.

In the end I decided to buy a newer MacBook Pro model with four Thunderbolt 3 ports (again from the Patreon proceeds, not sure if I'd be able otherwise). This new model also had a bigger hard drive and more memory (16GB), because - as others have mentioned - DAZ assets love to occupy drive space. The reason for buying another Apple laptop is that I didn't want to sacrifice portability and have a second workstation, I'm also not very proficient in building my own PCs.
Now I can work everywhere on Sisterly Lust on a single machine, without having to maintain two asset libraries. The actual rendering is done in batches while I sleep.

Currently, I use the EFI solution by goalque posted on the egpu.io forums, which comes with a handy installer. It allows you to reboot your Mac into a special mode, allowing the GPU to function. After rebooting and logging in, I plug the enclosure in and a script automatically logs in and out, after which the GPU functions. The next versions of the EFI will likely allow for hotplugging (and unplugging), eliminating another hoop you have to jump through.

The Titan Xp chews happily through any scenes so far, so I'm very happy with that card.

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scene (simple in the sense that there are not a lot of objects visible) rendered in less than 20 minutes, if I remember correctly. DAZ3D performance (posing, loading figures) on a laptop is tolerable and the new beta has better load times for scenes, but my guess is that a decent Windows machine will outperform it easily. With three or more Genesis 3 models things start to get sluggish, but maybe that's to be expected, as they're complex objects.

So, all in all, there are some pretty big downsides, the major one being the lack of support by Apple for Nvidia cards in combination with eGPUs. If you have an AMD it'll work great, but you won't be able to render in Iray... You have to accept the quirks and be willing to take some risks, though the EFI method is the safest solution to enable unsupported cards, so far. But if Apple decides to break the current hacks in an upcoming software update we're at square one again.

 

[MrBree]

Thank you so much for your comment @

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( That reminds me to check out your game again. It's a good one. )

That pretty much answers everything I needed to know.
Is an eGPU ideal? No. Will it work? Yes.
And it worked out rather well for you.

Given that my estimate of $1,500+ for a desktop seemed to come out reasonably correct, an eGPU would cost 1/3 to 1/4 of that and I could still reuse the GPU if I wanted/needed to build out a desktop later.

(No, I'm not counting a laptop as part of this budget, since it would already be purchased for other reasons.)