How to Build the Best PC for 3D Rendering and Animation

[fauxplayer]

I thought this was a valuable read. I don't necessarily agree with their specific hardware choices, but the explanations and FAQs I thought were valuable. I'd be interested in feedback from devs who do lots of rendering!

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And or anyone interested in building their own PC for a specific purpose, their overall chart is pretty useful:

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[Rich]

It's interesting that they don't mention Daz Studio in their "rendering software," but I suspect they're leaning toward rendering animations rather than static images, and Daz isn't exactly top-notch at animations.

Your GPU is absolutely key - the highest-end NVidia GPU you can afford is the way to go. Remember that even if it's slightly overkill right now, the software and the stuff it processes are only going to get bigger over the next few years, so skimping on the GPU now will mean buying another one later. With respect to the GPU, for rendering purposes, you're dealing with (effectively) three quantities:

• Amount of video RAM. If your scene won't fit into your GPU's RAM, your GPU isn't going to be able to render it. Now, different packages handle this different ways. Daz Studio requires the entire scene to be in memory at all times. I'm not up on some of the other packages, so I don't know if they're able to do "render the left side now and the right side later" and limit the amount of textures and such that need to get loaded accordingly. (That's very tricky.) But (at least with current technologies), putting in two cards each with 8Gb of video RAM doesn't let you load a scene that takes 16Gb.
• Number of CUDA cores. This essentially tells you how many little render algorithms the card can be doing in parallel.
• Clock speed.

So performance of your GPU, from a rendering point of view, is approximately "Number of CUDA cores times clock speed". That's not perfect, but it's a reasonable rule of thumb. Video RAM tells you how big a scene you can render.

If you go with dual video cards (or more) that effectively multiplies the number of cores by two (or more). It's not a perfectly linear function, because there's overhead in loading up the second card, but that overhead is usually small in the face of a long render. So two 1080's will render approximately twice as fast as one 1080, but won't (in most cases) let you handle a scene that's twice the size. (That may change with the next generation of GPU cards - NVidia keeps talking about "RAM stacking" as a feature, but has yet to release it.)

The other thing that people overlook is cooling. Doing 3D renders is MUCH harder on your GPU (on average) than gaming, because it runs flat out the entire time you're rendering, whereas the vast majority of games are specifically designed NOT to max out your GPU, because they want margin to prevent frame jitter. So not only do you need to make sure you have plenty of power supply, but you need plenty of cooling as well so that you don't fry your GPU. IMHO, this also advises against overclocking your GPU. Since rendering is already hard on it, overclocking might put you into "melt down" territory when the same amount of overclocking might be perfectly fine for gaming. Monitor your GPU's temperature when rendering until you know that your setup is adequate from a cooling perspective.

Anyway, that's my $0.02. Your mileage may vary, particularly if you're using rendering packages other than the ones I use...

 

[uradamus]

You could always consider going with a render farm service, there are several out there that support iRay.

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With all the asshole cryptominers out there driving up the GPU prices, it might be a lot cheaper to go with one of those than to build your own. Especially if you already have a computer that is good enough to run Daz and the likes as is and it's just render speed where they're lacking.

 

[thecardinal]

Instead of spending money on hardware, you could spend the money on render engines. Octane is switching to a monthly fee pretty soon. I paid $400 for it and I run it on a shitty computer with a GTX 1080 (which I bought before prices went up) and I can do good renders in 5-20 minutes.

 

[Hadley]

Sadly that there is no system like Folding@Home/SETI@Home for rendering 3D Scenes. I would like to use my 1080 Ti during sleep to support the Devs I like with some Hardware power or something.

 

[uradamus]

Another thing worth considering, later this year

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will be coming out and it will bring with it a new almost real time

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(physical based rendering) viewport renderer named

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. Also right now game engines like

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,

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,

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, and

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all have a real-time PBR implementations already. Armory3D in particular looks really promising and it is integrated right into a build of Blender and thanks to the lead dev reaching his goal for monthly patreon donations, the premade builds are available free to all as of a few days back.

The reason I bring this up is that you can use a real-time PBR engine for real time renders. You don't have to use any of those game engines for your game itself, you can just import your scene/models/poses/animations, set up a camera, HDRI, and any extra lamps you may need. Then just build/run the scene and take screenshots in full screen to get your renders, if you have a 1080p screen, then those screenshots will be 1080p and look just about as good, if not better, than anything you'll get out of Daz/iRay with the added benefit that there is virtually no rendering time and you can accomplish this with just a half-decent gaming rig from the past ~5-10 years, which most of us already have.

It's even more convenient if you go with Armory3D, since you can do all your work straight in Blender and not have to mess around with importing anything. It'll make for a nice stand-in real-time renderer until Eevee finally gets released. If you are already deep into using Daz and want to work with your assets from there, you can actually get most things into Blender without too much fuss from what I can tell, though I haven't tried it myself to say for sure. But this

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for Blender appears to keep getting better with each release and should already be able to handle nearly everything you need.

 

[thecardinal]

Day Studio's Iray is the cheapest and easiest option though. No import or exporting anything.

But you can only pose or render, not both at the same time. Plus I feel like Iray renders have a certain look. All the textures are too clay-like for my taste. I can't quite describe it, but most of them have like a polished plasticy Barbie Doll look. :/

 

[OhWee]

You can run two (or more) instances of Daz Studio btw, doing scene adjustments in one while the other instance is rendering. I wouldn't recommend rendering two instances simultaneeously, as memory may not be avaialble, but it can be done... 2 instances rendering simultaneously might be more prone to crashes though if you are doing dual renders.

Be aware that if you are using Windows 10, that Windows will sequester about 18% of your VRAM, making it unavailable for Daz Studio. I only get to use about 6.4 GB of my 8 GB 1080's. Supposedly the pro cards don't see the 'WDDM Tax', and previous versions of Windows didn't sequester nearly this much. Pro cards are usually much more expensive though, but I suppose there's always Ebay...

But yeah, if you are using Daz Iray for your render needs, shoot for the largest Nvidia VRAM card you can afford. Multiple cards will help, although the memory wont' 'stack', it'll just reduce your render times if the scene can fit in each individual card's VRAM.

And yeah, there are the render farm services, but I always wonder what happens if the 'porn police' at any given server farm figure out that you are doing erotic renders, if you are using '3rd party' rendering solutions/render farms. Thinking about incest/bestiality issues here...

 

[Porcus Dev]

I haven't done much rendering, yet, mainly because I'm using an 8 year old system that has reached the end of it's upgrade capabilities. It's still a very good system, as I'd bought high end originally, but just not up to snuff anymore.

The system I'm looking to build is almost a clone to their Professional Build, with a few small differences:
i7 7820x @ 4.3GHz
Asus X-299A MB
32GB DDR4-2666 (2x16)
Water cooled, single fan, w/ 2 additional 120mm case fans
970 EVO 1TB M.2 SSD
2x 4TB Barracuda
1000w power supply (just in case)
GTX 1080 8GB
Blu-ray w/r (only $15 more than just a reader)
Cooler Master Open Cool Pro case
Win 10 Pro

I've scrimped (?) a bit on some and gone overboard on most others compared to what I think I'll actually need for the time being but, hopefully, it will be a long time before needing any upgrade.

I'm coming in at $3060 - scared the Hell out of me, but I've got it and it's time to upgrade.

Any yeas, nays or warnings before I pull the trigger?

If you're thinking about spending that amount of money on workstation I would recommend you to buy a 1080Ti with its 11GB
But best thing is to wait a few months to see how the market evolves, now in August Nvidia will lauch new series.

 

[OhWee]

I'd suggest taking a serious look at a Threadripper setup. The 8 core Threadripper comes in at just slightly cheaper than the i7 you mentioned ($429 at the moment), but has more PCIe lanes (60, other 4 are used by the chipset), which could be useful later if you start plugging in additional graphics cards. The 16 core threadripper can be had for less than $800 (it was $699 for a short bit recently), and will likely drop in price shortly, after the 12 nanometer 16, 24, and 32 Core Threadripper 2's are released in the next couple of weeks.

Daz Iray loves multi GPU setups for rendering. If you aren't doing Iray (i.e. 3Delight) then the GPU is much less important.

And yeah, as mgomez0077 mentioned I wouldn't consider anything less than a GTX 1080 Ti. For Daz Iray rendering, the graphics card is the most important component. CPU speed isn't that important, as long as your scene can fit in the graphics card memory. Iray GPU renders are MUCH faster (around 10-20x faster unless you have a LOT of CPU cores, even then it's at least 5x as fast).

Both Nvidia and AMD are dropping new product over the next month or so, so you would do well to wait. If nothing else, the current product lineups (GTX series, Threadrippers) will drop in price, as new products move to the top of the product stack.

 

[Johndoe777x]

Can someone recommend a good build for a Micro or Mini ITX or ATX, thanks

 

[OhWee]

Can someone recommend a good build for a Micro or Mini ITX or ATX, thanks

Any particular reason you are looking for a smaller setup? Micro ATX generally has less PCIe slots.

That being said, there is this TR4 Micro ATX board for Threadripper...

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You wouldn't need all of those PCIe lanes of course (Threadripper has 60 + 4 for chipset), and it looks like 2 graphics cards would be the best you could hope for. Ryzen or Intel setups might make more sense in that size.

The Mini ITX Ryzen boards are rather cute though. And rumor has it we will see 16 core Ryzens sometime next year...

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You'll be stuck with only 1 PCIe 16 slot with these though. I'd highly suggest looking at something with more usable PCIe 16 slots. Even if they drop to x8 (in a multi-card setup), in reality x8 is just a couple of percentage points slower than x16 when rendering.
Two graphics cards for Iray is nice. Three isn't that much faster, and 4 is probably overkill...