- Jun 17, 2017
- 5,718
- 28,979
I'm going to 'necro' this thread as I have a new perspective on this.
My Uber Laptop is a now dated MSI GT83VR with dual GTX 1080s in it. I hit the 8GB VRAM wall often enough when setting up fairly complex scenes, and have been wanting an option with more VRAM to use, both on a temporary and on a more permanent basis.
I have one Thunderbolt 3 port, and I finally bought an eGPU enclosure. It's a Razer Core X enclosure if anyone cares. I dropped a 12GB RTX 3060 into it, and finally settled on using Daz 4.16 as 4.12.086 doesn't support 30 series cards. Also, Windows 10 for reference.
As for Uber Laptop, it has a quad core i7-6820 CPU, which is quite dated at this point, but is more than plenty for Daz Studio, and I have 64GB of system ram installed. It has an 18.4" screen, good luck finding a desktop replacement class laptop with larger than a 17" screen these days. I paid too much for this rig though, but at least I'm squeezing more life out of my investment.
It has decent storage expandability. I currently have an 8 TB SATA SSD holding my Daz Studio install, a 2 TB SATA M2 drive that contains my OS, and two free NVME M2 slots for additional 8 TB NVME SSDs if I should decide to upgrade further. And of course I have external USB drives for backup purposes, because backups are almost always a good idea.
I also have a 32" 4K monitor attached which I use for other stuff while Daz is crunching away on the 1080p laptop screen. I did try moving Daz Studio over to the 4K monitor screen, but things get weird positionally when sleep mode kicks in, so it's just better to leave Daz on the 'native' laptop screen for now, and use the 4K screen for say Renpy editing/writing, light gaming and such while renders are baking. I'll eventually buld a dedicated rig which will use the 4K monitor, but it's nice to put it to use in the meantime.
I waited this long to grab a new GPU do to the GPU pricing craziness in the last couple of years. Card availability at near MSRP is finally a thing again. I spent a little more than MSRP for the card I picked, but at least it wasn't 1.5x, 2x, 3x MSRP, and didn't want to wait any longer, but I digress.
I may eventually go for a bigger 30 series card, I picked the 3060 with dual fans to go into my interim rendering rig when I eventually 'retire' that system to HTPC duties. The case I picked for it is VCR-sized, so it'll 'fit' inside my TV stand with my stereo, etc. just fine when the time comes. I technically could do that now, as I have an APU installed in that rig (Ryzen 2400G) which is fine for movies, but I like having a 'fallback' system for rendering if things go south again with my 'dedicated' rendering rig, so the RTX 3060 will eventually go into the HTPC rig.
Also, then I could 'tag team' so to speak and run Daz on two systems at that point if I was feeling particularly productive that day. But I digress
I've been impressed with how 'seamless' things have been, well after updating to Daz Studio 4.16 at least. Daz Studio CAN use the eGPU to drive the Iray viewport with no hiccups really. The trick is that the eGPU box needs to be plugged in before you boot, so that the system can 'access' it properly, but other than that, it transfers scenes across the TBolt 3 cable just fine, and is plenty fast. I'm sure it'd be slightly faster across a PCIe-16 interface of course, but for rendering, I'm just not noticing it, as the 3060 by itself is faster than my dual GTX 1080s, for a couple of reasons - faster cores, new raytracing capabilities maybe, faster memory.
I've been using this setup for about a month now. The system will use all three GPUs for rendering when the scenes are small enough for the 8GB laptop GPUs, with no issues to speak of as long as all three GPUs are checked under the render settings.
The RTX 3060 by itself is able to render 'simple character checks', i.e. when I'm dialing in a new character with some basic clothes and a simple HDRI background, in the 3-5 minute range, this used to take a bit longer with the dual 1080s, so again I think something else is in play besides the faster GPU cores... I no longer 'sweat' waiting on quick test renders like I used to.
There are occasional glitches, but then Daz Studio is glitch-ey to begin with, so nothing that feels unusual to me. You never know when Daz Studio will decide to crash, so of course I save often...
I am curious if the Thunderbolt 3 implementation on the AMD side would be this smooth (not many AMD motherboards support this, but there are a few options), when I finally get around to building a dedicated multi-GPU rendering rig, but in the meantime, no regrets. Threadripper is 'Pro' now and rather expensive, so at this point I'll be curious to see what the next generation CPUs and associated motherboards will bring. My current setup is working well enough in the meantime.
I just wanted to share my own experience, should someone else be in the same boat, i.e. you have a laptop with a Thunderbolt port, or even a desktop system with no spare PCIe slots for your graphics cards but that supports Thunderbolt, and are curious about more recent experiences with eGPU setups.
My Uber Laptop is a now dated MSI GT83VR with dual GTX 1080s in it. I hit the 8GB VRAM wall often enough when setting up fairly complex scenes, and have been wanting an option with more VRAM to use, both on a temporary and on a more permanent basis.
I have one Thunderbolt 3 port, and I finally bought an eGPU enclosure. It's a Razer Core X enclosure if anyone cares. I dropped a 12GB RTX 3060 into it, and finally settled on using Daz 4.16 as 4.12.086 doesn't support 30 series cards. Also, Windows 10 for reference.
As for Uber Laptop, it has a quad core i7-6820 CPU, which is quite dated at this point, but is more than plenty for Daz Studio, and I have 64GB of system ram installed. It has an 18.4" screen, good luck finding a desktop replacement class laptop with larger than a 17" screen these days. I paid too much for this rig though, but at least I'm squeezing more life out of my investment.
It has decent storage expandability. I currently have an 8 TB SATA SSD holding my Daz Studio install, a 2 TB SATA M2 drive that contains my OS, and two free NVME M2 slots for additional 8 TB NVME SSDs if I should decide to upgrade further. And of course I have external USB drives for backup purposes, because backups are almost always a good idea.
I also have a 32" 4K monitor attached which I use for other stuff while Daz is crunching away on the 1080p laptop screen. I did try moving Daz Studio over to the 4K monitor screen, but things get weird positionally when sleep mode kicks in, so it's just better to leave Daz on the 'native' laptop screen for now, and use the 4K screen for say Renpy editing/writing, light gaming and such while renders are baking. I'll eventually buld a dedicated rig which will use the 4K monitor, but it's nice to put it to use in the meantime.
I waited this long to grab a new GPU do to the GPU pricing craziness in the last couple of years. Card availability at near MSRP is finally a thing again. I spent a little more than MSRP for the card I picked, but at least it wasn't 1.5x, 2x, 3x MSRP, and didn't want to wait any longer, but I digress.
I may eventually go for a bigger 30 series card, I picked the 3060 with dual fans to go into my interim rendering rig when I eventually 'retire' that system to HTPC duties. The case I picked for it is VCR-sized, so it'll 'fit' inside my TV stand with my stereo, etc. just fine when the time comes. I technically could do that now, as I have an APU installed in that rig (Ryzen 2400G) which is fine for movies, but I like having a 'fallback' system for rendering if things go south again with my 'dedicated' rendering rig, so the RTX 3060 will eventually go into the HTPC rig.
Also, then I could 'tag team' so to speak and run Daz on two systems at that point if I was feeling particularly productive that day. But I digress
I've been impressed with how 'seamless' things have been, well after updating to Daz Studio 4.16 at least. Daz Studio CAN use the eGPU to drive the Iray viewport with no hiccups really. The trick is that the eGPU box needs to be plugged in before you boot, so that the system can 'access' it properly, but other than that, it transfers scenes across the TBolt 3 cable just fine, and is plenty fast. I'm sure it'd be slightly faster across a PCIe-16 interface of course, but for rendering, I'm just not noticing it, as the 3060 by itself is faster than my dual GTX 1080s, for a couple of reasons - faster cores, new raytracing capabilities maybe, faster memory.
I've been using this setup for about a month now. The system will use all three GPUs for rendering when the scenes are small enough for the 8GB laptop GPUs, with no issues to speak of as long as all three GPUs are checked under the render settings.
The RTX 3060 by itself is able to render 'simple character checks', i.e. when I'm dialing in a new character with some basic clothes and a simple HDRI background, in the 3-5 minute range, this used to take a bit longer with the dual 1080s, so again I think something else is in play besides the faster GPU cores... I no longer 'sweat' waiting on quick test renders like I used to.
There are occasional glitches, but then Daz Studio is glitch-ey to begin with, so nothing that feels unusual to me. You never know when Daz Studio will decide to crash, so of course I save often...
I am curious if the Thunderbolt 3 implementation on the AMD side would be this smooth (not many AMD motherboards support this, but there are a few options), when I finally get around to building a dedicated multi-GPU rendering rig, but in the meantime, no regrets. Threadripper is 'Pro' now and rather expensive, so at this point I'll be curious to see what the next generation CPUs and associated motherboards will bring. My current setup is working well enough in the meantime.
I just wanted to share my own experience, should someone else be in the same boat, i.e. you have a laptop with a Thunderbolt port, or even a desktop system with no spare PCIe slots for your graphics cards but that supports Thunderbolt, and are curious about more recent experiences with eGPU setups.
