I was wondering, what are the ideal tech specs for working with Daz? In other words, what should I ideally have in terms of RAM, Graphics Card, processor, etc? I have some money that I could possibly use to upgrade my laptop or buy a new one, I just need to know what the best specs are to see if I have enough money, otherwise it's looking like I'm going to have to give up before I even begin.
If you're going to get serious with Daz, the single most important thing is an NVidia GPU, since this is what iRay will use to hardware accelerate your renders. It has to be NVidia - other GPU's (AMD, or the Intel one built into many laptops) won't cut it. If you're going to stick with a laptop, that probably puts you over into the "gaming sector," where laptops are available with decent NVidia GPU's. As just one example, Alienware makes laptops with NVidia GPU's.
That being said, as was recommended above, you may want to consider a desktop instead of a laptop. You'll have more choices in terms of hardware combinations. In addition, serious iRay rendering can be harder on your system heat-wise than gaming generally is, so it might overstress a laptop's cooling system unless you get a top quality one. A desktop also gives you more options for later - adding a second GPU, for example.
Depending on what kind of connectors your current laptop has, an external GPU box (a.k.a. eGPU) add-on might be an option. Going that route might minimize your total investment, as you wouldn't necessarily have to discard your current laptop, and could put the money into a higher-end GPU.
Among NVidia GPU's, you're looking at three basic quantities - cores, clock speed and memory. Video RAM will determine how big a scene can be hardware rendered. As was mentioned above, Scene Optimizer is a great tool to get more scene into your card. Basically, most Daz assets come with textures that are VERY high-resolution, just in case you decide to render an extreme closeup of that character's fingernail. For average scenes, they're complete overkill. So Scene Optimizer lets you substitute a lower-resolution texture which, in 99% of the cases, looks perfectly good. (I've run into a few situations in which it can make skins look a bit waxy - haven't investigated which map was to blame.)
Cores and clock speed all go to the performance of the card - the rate at which it will render is effectively proportional to both. (But overclocking to try to get better render speed isn't a good idea because of the heating issue I mentioned early.) But if you're trying to guess rendering speed comparisons between two different cards to do that bang-vs-buck tradeoff, they're a useful metric.
The new NVidia RTX cards are looking interesting, but they're quite expensive by comparison to the previous generation. Right now (as was indicated) they're only supported in the 4.11 beta. Nobody outside of Daz and NVidia know for certain, but the evidence suggests that iRay will
not be taking advantage of the ray tracking features that were new in the RTX series. (I could be proven wrong - that just seems to be the current "take" on that.) This means you might be better of just sticking with the 10x0 generation, rather than paying the premium for the 20x0 generation. I'm having VERY good luck with my 1080's (not the Ti's) - they have 8GB of VRAM. After Windows steals some (which it always does), that means I have upwards of 6GB available for render. With judicious use of Scene Optimizer, I haven't had a scene yet that I couldn't render, even with 6+ characters and scenery. So you can do pretty well with that generation. Of course, the Ti's have more RAM and marginally better performance, but the question is whether it's worth it.
As for the rest, your CPU really doesn't factor into the rendering part of things if you've got a working GPU. You'll certainly want a minimum of 16Gb of RAM, but that's just about de rigeur for Windows these days. And storage? Well, that all depends on how many Daz assets you accumulate, but those
can be put on an external drive if you need to.
Anyway, that's my take on the matter, for what it's worth.
