How can I improve my PC for DAZ?

[31971207]

The practice of using an old graphics card along with a new graphics card for Daz3D was popular when people were short of VRAM as Windows 10 reserves 1-2.5GB away from rendering which is a lot in a 4GB card. RTX3070 is a 8GB card and unless OP is doing a lot of very complex scenes the headache (you will have to manually switch display if you want to game on the RTX3070) and the additional heat/power of using an extra graphics card in the case is often not worth it.

 

[iOtero]

I think it's a great idea to use both GPUs.

Now I have to look for a new PSU (1000W-1200W), because I have already ordered this card from Amazon: Gigabyte GeForce RTX 3090 Gaming OC - Graphics card (24 GB, GDDR6X).

If you are going to spend a lot of money... spend it well even if it is more than you thought... I will thank my friend Visa Platinum...

And I thank you, my friend, you have been very helpful to me...

I guess if I want to play Witcher 3 Wild Hunt or Call Of Duty XXXXX or Shadow Of The Tomb Raider someday I better connect the monitor to the RTX, right? That will be rare, as I still have to play the Sinclair ZX Spectrum (my first computer) and Commodore Amiga games...

 

[OhWee]

To add insult to injury...

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Which explains the recent Asus price hikes. It's not like you could get them at MSRP anyways due to the cryptocurrency miners and scalpers hoovering them all up in the first place...

Of course those tariffs are US tariffs, so other people in the world won't have to deal with them.

 

[iOtero]

To add insult to injury...

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Which explains the recent Asus price hikes. It's not like you could get them at MSRP anyways due to the cryptocurrency miners and scalpers hoovering them all up in the first place...

Of course those tariffs are US tariffs, so other people in the world won't have to deal with them.

Well, it seems that this time I was lucky to be born and live in Spain

 

[iOtero]

The practice of using an old graphics card along with a new graphics card for Daz3D was popular when people were short of VRAM as Windows 10 reserves 1-2.5GB away from rendering which is a lot in a 4GB card. RTX3070 is a 8GB card and unless OP is doing a lot of very complex scenes the headache (you will have to manually switch display if you want to game on the RTX3070) and the additional heat/power of using an extra graphics card in the case is often not worth it.

Well, now I have another question, will my 650W PSU be enough for my new RTX? One option to recover money would be to sell the GTX, you could ask 200-260 euros for it on ebay...
Thanks for your help...

 

[darkhound1]

Y ahora se me ocurre otra pregu

Well, now I have another question, will my 650W PSU be enough for my new RTX? One option to recover money would be to sell the GTX, you could ask 200-260 euros for it on ebay...
Thanks for your help...

It's hard to be sure.
I'd say for rendering with Iray it should work and not cause any problems.
Why: Because the GPU load is much lower using IRay (because the memory bus and interface is not used very much) and also your CPU will not run at 100% load.
For gaming you will (with a high probability) get problems. It's not a good idea to run a 650W PSU at 600W or more for a longer period of time. It can work if it is a high quality PSU, but noise, heat will still be high.
If you have 1,7K to get the RTX, you should spend another 150EUR to get a new PSU.

 

[iOtero]

It's hard to be sure.
I'd say for rendering with Iray it should work and not cause any problems.
Why: Because the GPU load is much lower using IRay (because the memory bus and interface is not used very much) and also your CPU will not run at 100% load.
For gaming you will (with a high probability) get problems. It's not a good idea to run a 650W PSU at 600W or more for a longer period of time. It can work if it is a high quality PSU, but noise, heat will still be high.
If you have 1,7K to get the RTX, you should spend another 150EUR to get a new PSU.

I know I have to buy another PSU, but there are few powerful ones on sale right now, I can get for 125EUR an 850W EVGA, but will it be enough for both cards? Will it be enough only for the RTX?

It's not a question of money, I was looking for a 1200W PSU but the only one I found was at Amazon.es, but I don't know the brand Kolink...

 

[darkhound1]

850w evga will surely be enough for only the rtx 3090. With such a powerful card, anything below a rtx 2070 doesn't make much sense to add to it. You won't feel any difference, so I wouldn't use the gtx960 any more.
For adding a second gpu that would make a difference, the 850w psu is too weak.

 

[iOtero]

850w evga will surely be enough for only the rtx 3090. With such a powerful card, anything below a rtx 2070 doesn't make much sense to add to it. You won't feel any difference, so I wouldn't use the gtx960 any more.
For adding a second gpu that would make a difference, the 850w psu is too weak.

OK, Thank you. I will buy an EVGA GQ 850W 80 Plus Gold Modular for 135EUR.

 

[OhWee]

This is a bit off topic, but for those following this thread that might be considering building a rendering rig atm.

So I had a thought, since hardware is being hoovered up by cryptocurrency miners atm due to insane values of cryptocurrency right now.

There's a new batch of AMD powered gaming laptops that will be showcased next week for CES 2021 (CES is an online only event this year BTW). We've had leaks already of a 3080 powered 17" laptop sporting an 8 core Cezanne APU processor (Renoir successor).

Anyways, for those of you that might be trying to hunt down options for a rendering rig, I'd imagine that laptops might be your best option right now. There are a number of reasons that normally most of us would strongly steer you away from laptops, but these aren't normal times...

My point here is that, if you need a rig right now to tide you over, with a decent Nvidia GPU, there are Intel powered and AMD powered laptops out there to consider.

Sure, these are in high demand as well, but at least they are available. HOWEVER, prices are rather insane ATM, but I am seeing a couple of laptops with RTX 2080s in them for under $2000. If you can make do with a 6 GB Nvidia GPU, there are quite a few laptop options in the $1000-$1500 USD range on Newegg.

Your other option may be to just wait for the cryptocurrency bubble to burst, as has happened several times before over the years. There may be a buttload of used GPUs flooding the market at that point... that could be a number of months from now though.

You can always 'retire' said laptop to internet duty once we get past this insanity, and use it as a gaming rig to distract you while you are waiting on renders to bake...

Anyways, yeah, food for thought if you REALLY need something right now.

 

[31971207]

Well, now I have another question, will my 650W PSU be enough for my new RTX? One option to recover money would be to sell the GTX, you could ask 200-260 euros for it on ebay...
Thanks for your help...

I have a MSI RTX3090 and it is not happy with my Seasonic WhiteSilent 750W because Ampere will suck in as much power to boost performance beyond stock as long as thermal allows it. Mine kept trying to boost above 2050mhz (stock boost is only 1725) and often crashed before I manually undervolt to 1950mhz to keep it stable. 850W is minimum if you have decent airflow in the case and don't undervolt. Seasonic customer service said only select 750W PSU is compatible with 3090/3080 but all their current 850W are.

EDIT: In my experience 3090 uses more power when gaming than rendering.

 

[darkhound1]

EDIT: In my experience 3090 uses more power when gaming than rendering.

All GPUs do that. I have explained why a little further up. My 2080 only uses about 150W while rendering.

I personally don't think that using a laptop as a rendering machine is a good idea in the long run, because you won't be able to reuse any of the components if you want to upgrade.
Most people that render already have a PC they use for rendering right now. You can buy a RTX 3070 in Europe for around 700/750 EUR right now. Even if you don't have a PC, you can built one (without the GPU) for 500-600 EUR.
Unless it's really very outdated, most probably won't even need to change anything else on their existing PC, since power usage on the 3070 is still reasonable. The 3070 is roughly 1.5 times faster than a 2080 when rendering.
And a 2080 is around 2.3 times faster than a 1070ti.
So even if you have a 1070ti in your rendering rig right now, replacing it by a RTX 3070 will incrase render performance by a factor of almost 3.5. With this difference in performance, keeping the 1070 in or replacing it doesn't make much of a difference.
If you can keep your psu with just the rtx 3070, that's the way I'd go.

 

[khumak]

So this card leaked...

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12 GB of VRAM for $449 US sounds pretty awesome to me. This might be the new Daz budget king card, but of course it'll probably be unobtanium when it launches, between the scalpers and crypto miners hoovering them all up.

Nonetheless, once supply catches up with demand, yeah... or if you are particularly brave and can find a place to pre-order it, just make sure the seller has a decent return policy just in case some issue pops up...

As to how it relates to your build, others have given some good advice already. You can 'make do' with your existing board, but if you can afford to upgrade ATM, say to the Ryzen 5 3600 build as suggested by recreation , well it's a thought.

The main thing I'd look at with Nvidia cards, as others have suggested, is the amount of Ram first (as it relates to the cards within your budget range), then the generation of card. I'm using a 1080 Ti. The RTX 20 and 30 series cards are faster, but a lot of my more complex scenes hit the 11 GB of VRAM wall pretty quickly, and a CPU based render in Iray is MUCH slower. Yes, you can optimize, but that takes extra time, and some of the time I end up doing multiple passes with say 1/2 or 1/3 of the total characters in the scene in each pass, then merging them in Photoshop... the point here being, the more VRAM you have available (to a point), the less likely your more complex renders will exceed the available VRAM...

The 24 GB RTX 3090 would be awesome, except for that $1500+ US Price range. Which is why that 'leaked' 12 GB card in the linked article above looks so promising...

If for some reason you decide that you aren't going to be doing Iray rendering (most people around here using DS are on the Iray bandwagon, myself included), at that point the GPU becomes much less important, as 3Delight and probably Filament are CPU based rendering engines. 3Delight has less support than Iray does these days. But if 3Delight is the way you want to go, at that point more CPU cores good! At that point, the 8, 12, or 16 core AMD options start looking pretty good... but for Iray, yeah 6 cores is probably plenty... But for 3Delight, pretty much any modern graphics card should do fine running the desktop and the Daz (non-Iray) viewport.

My personal advice is definitely arrange for at least 2 TB of drive space, as Daz Studio files plus your own saves add up space wise pretty quickly. For Daz Studio, HDDs are perfectly fine, and an SSD isn't going to speed things up inside of Studio all that much, and there are a number of 4 TB HDDs available in the roughly $100 range US (some more, some less). A suitable SSD for the boot drive is also a good idea, size based on budget (personally I'd suggest no less than 512 GB if you plan to install a fair amount other stuff on the C: partition), but you could install everything Daz Studio related on your HDD. 2 TB SSD's are around (I use these along with a HDD), and even larger ones, but as the GB increases the prices really start to jump up...

Food for thought!

That's pretty much my take on it as well. I was hoping to build a system around a 20GB 3080Ti but I suspect when that comes out it will either be permanently out of stock or dramatically overpriced (way above it's MSRP). Unfortunately for me I'm still using both a low end CPU and a low end GPU (GTX 1050Ti). So I really do need an upgrade badly if I want to do much rendering.

I'm leaning towards abandoning my original idea for a high end development box and instead build more of a "bare minimum" dev box with something like a 6 core 12 thread AMD CPU and a 12GB 3060Ti. Then I'll wait for prices to come down to earth with the 40xx series or later before getting any sort of high end card. And if prices never do come down then I'll just keep buying low end cards with "good enough" memory.

Personally, I think 16GB is the sweet spot for memory on a GPU meant for rendering. When I've played around with Scene Optimizer to get things within the 4GB limit of my current GPU I usually find the memory utilization for most of my scenes that require optimization to be in the 12-16GB range. I only have 16GB of system ram so it's possible there are cases where I exceed that as well but I think that's probably rare.

My real goal for a rendering GPU is for it to be reasonably fast, but more importantly to have enough memory that I NEVER have to open scene optimizer. Optimizing scenes due to memory considerations is a huge waste of time that I would really rather avoid. It's certainly worth it if you are stuck with a low end card but if you're doing a lot of rendering that can easily add up to hundreds of hours of time wasted just making your scene look worse to improve render speed.

 

[iOtero]

Well, everything you say is very interesting... I was so happy for my purchase of the 3090 at Amazon.es for a quite tight price and today I found this:


It is in Spanish, but it is a notice of cancellation of the order. They say they are out of stock. I think they were selling it very cheaply and that's why they've cancelled it, but there's nothing I can do... Bargainer is a company from Germany and I'm in Spain, so I better not waste my time...
Now there is nothing more than Quadro cards, which I don't know if they are suitable for rendering...
And in another store I found a KFA2 GeForce RTX 3070 8GB SG 1-Click OC for just under 800 euros, I do not know if it will be a good purchase ... The thing is that between the virus and the snow storm we have in Europe... there is little to choose from...
The truth is that I'm tired of waiting and hoping... Do you think this is a good card to make renders at 3840x2160 for visual novels or similar games?

 

[OhWee]

Since you are in a holding pattern anyways, Nvidia had some relevant announcments today.

They are claiming to be releasing a 3060 with 12GB of VRAM for $329 in February. There was also 16 GB card announced today.

More interestingly, there's a 16 GB of the 3080 for Laptops apparently (also an 8 GB version). It'll be interesting to see the 3080 Max Q laptops. They ARE targetted at content creators, which would be us Daz types among other folks...

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Of course, the desktop parts will be hoovered up about immediately, so if you are considering grabbing one, normally I'm not a fan of pre-orders but that may be your best bet (from a reliable vendor, lots of vendors put up pre-orders only to cancel them when stock is insuffient). That or camping out at Micro Center, etc. a day or two in advance or something...

 

[iOtero]

Since you are in a holding pattern anyways, Nvidia had some relevant announcments today.

They are claiming to be releasing a 3060 with 12GB of VRAM for $329 in February. There was also 16 GB card announced today.

More interestingly, there's a 16 GB of the 3080 for Laptops apparently (also an 8 GB version). It'll be interesting to see the 3080 Max Q laptops. They ARE targetted at content creators, which would be us Daz types among other folks...

You must be registered to see the links

Of course, the desktop parts will be hoovered up about immediately, so if you are considering grabbing one, normally I'm not a fan of pre-orders but that may be your best bet (from a reliable vendor, lots of vendors put up pre-orders only to cancel them when stock is insuffient). That or camping out at Micro Center, etc. a day or two in advance or something...

Thanks, it's very interesting information, but I don't plan to wait for those things to arrive in Spain in the summer...
If you wait and hope for the best, you will be waiting all your life...
From what I have read in some reviews, an RTX 3070 8GB is not a cannon, but it is not the shitty Derringer I have either... Thanks again.

 

[OhWee]

Thanks, it's very interesting information, but I don't plan to wait for those things to arrive in Spain in the summer...
If you wait and hope for the best, you will be waiting all your life...
From what I have read in some reviews, an RTX 3070 8GB is not a cannon, but it is not the shitty Derringer I have either... Thanks again.

The 3080 has over double the CUDA cores of the 3060 part (the 3060 Ti has more cores, a bit over half of the 3080, but less VRAM), and speed wise is an Iray rendering monster (second only to the 3090 and maybe 3080 Ti if that ever shows up). So if you can manage with 10 GB of (faster GDDR6x) VRAM, and manage to track a 3080 down at somewhere near MSRP, it's not a bad choice at all!

$329 MSRP for the 3060 with 12 GB of VRAM is a very compelling part for 'entry level/budget oriented' Daz builds, though, hence the mention. Of course, good luck finding one at that price when they are released, crypominers will be all over those cards...

 

[31971207]

3090 is readily avilable in China and not impossible to find at MSRP in the US anymore. 3080/3070/3060Ti are still very hard to buy. 3090 price/performance is not great for gamer/miner. It might be harder in Europe because the market is more fragmented.

Since you can afford a 3090 I would keep looking rather than settling for the 3070. 8GB is tricky. A decent size environment with 3-4 G8 characters could surpass that easily. I would not personally recommend spending $700 on a 8GB card right now. The current choices are bite the bullet and splurge on the 3090 if one has the money, wait for 16GB 3070Ti and 20GB 3080Ti after the summer, or try to find a 12GB 3060 when it becomes available in March/Arpil and upgrade again in 2-3 years. There is going to be a lot of buyer remorse of people picking up 10GB 3080 and 8GB 3070 from now on after the 12GB 3060 announcement.

 

[probably_dave]

I've just decided to make the jump to a 3090. Found a KFA2 version on Amazon for around 1,700 EUR (the cheapest I've seen for a while). It was only up for about an hour before it sold out. Ordered it Sunday evening with 1 week for delivery, but arrived this morning (Tuesday). This was an upgrade from my dedicated 2x1080 GTX (non SLI as I was using 1 for display, 1 for rendering). I'll also be using it for VR and I had a fair few amazon vouchers to use up so I thought why not. I already had a 850W power and 64GB RAM so I no need to upgrade them.

Hopefully, this should give you an idea of the types of benefits (and drawbacks) from this type of upgrade:

• Performance is brilliant compared to my previous. As an example, this render:
  
• 4 vehicles, 4 people, 1 ground plane, hdri light and a emissive plane (+ 1 axe). Previously, I had to remove the Fire Engine in the back as it would constantly cause the render to hit CPU rather than GPU. I also had to split the image in 2 (2 girls on the left, front fire engine + police car then 2 girls on the right, ambulance and police car) and then merge into one. Each render took over an hour each time so probably overall time for the render was 3 hours. With the new card, I could include the engine in the back and all other characters and vehicles and it complete fully in 10 minutes. And a quick post work, and overall time was now 15 mins. So already a saving of around 2:45.
• Using the iRay viewport is now so much smoother. Previously, I would have to setup in texture view, switch to iRay (or a quick render), back to texture for adjustments etc. Now, I can do most directly with the iRay view and I get virtually instant feedback on my changes (the exception is if you have a seen with a lot of geometry edits (like using Mesh Smoother) as these rely on CPU for the calculation)
• It's bloody hot. The card itself had good heat dissipation (was not too hot to touch) however, by doing this, it dissipated the heat to the box. This meant the temperatures of the box as a whole started to increase to noticeable levels. This was after a few hours of nearly constant rendering however (was doing a lot of tests). Simply opening the cover of the box allowed it to cool down, but looks like I will need to get some better box cooling.
• It's big, pretty much taking up the same amount of room as the two GTXs, so make sure your box is big enough to get enough free air circulating around it. I would not want to put it too close to any key components as the dissipation will heat them too.
• Sound wise, it's pretty quite, only really making noticeable noise when I had the issue with the box cooling. Here, I could start hearing the fans spinning up (with the closed box and sitting about 1.5 metres away). As soon as I opened the box and let the system cool for a bit, I no longer had the problem. Now, when I render, I can barely here the difference (just the usual quite hum of the pc that you can hear because the box is open)

Overall, after 1 days usage, I would say it appears to be worth the upgrade, purely on a time saving basis. As I'm currently working on my first game where I expect to be rendering virtually constantly for the next 6 months, the time savings alone (both on rendering and how it's making the scenes easier to setup) should make up for the cost, even at the inflated price. Of course, only time will tell.

 

[iOtero]

I thank you all very much for the information you give me but I am determined to create a visual novel somewhat different from those around here and if I am lucky and I do well, which may not be, I will think about spending the euros that are needed to improve a team to render faster and better, but I can not continue with my EVGA GeForce GTX960 4GB FTW ACX 2.0 + because I'm waiting longer than doing ...

So now I will invest 700 euros in a KFA2 GeForce RTX 3070 1-Click OC 8GB GDDR6 and, later on, if I do well I can move to a 3090 or any of those novelties that you are telling me, but if my work is not successful I will not need such a powerful card because I really like the old games. Those of now, so aesthetically beautiful are more like movies where, from time to time, you do something..

Very, very, very thanks to all of you for your help and your patience.