You need an Nvidia card, no way around it.
The more VRAM, the better. I started out with a 2GB GTX 1050 and yeah, you can make it work... but I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. You want brute force — more RAM means you can work on heavier scenes. I’m on a 12GB RTX 3060 now, runs beautifully. It's a bit outdated already, but still solid. Below 8GB? You're basically gambling. And that also means learning hardcore optimization just to survive.
System RAM? 32GB is ideal. I managed with 16GB for a while — doable, but tight. I even used 8GB when I started. It worked, barely. But again, don't put yourself through that.
The more VRAM, the better. I started out with a 2GB GTX 1050 and yeah, you can make it work... but I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. You want brute force — more RAM means you can work on heavier scenes. I’m on a 12GB RTX 3060 now, runs beautifully. It's a bit outdated already, but still solid. Below 8GB? You're basically gambling. And that also means learning hardcore optimization just to survive.
System RAM? 32GB is ideal. I managed with 16GB for a while — doable, but tight. I even used 8GB when I started. It worked, barely. But again, don't put yourself through that.
Alex021
New Member
- Mar 21, 2020
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Thanks, No AMD and at least 12 Gb of VRAM with 32 GB of RAM. Would a 16GB 4060 be better than the 12GB 3060?
Might want to wait a minute. The 40 series of Nvidia GPU's have pretty much been discontinued and their replacements, the 50 series cards, do not work with DAZ and Iray yet. There's rumors of a patch or new version of DAZ soon that will let you use those new 5000 cards.
But basically, what you buy will be related to what your goals are. If you're just playing with DAZ as a hobby and not looking to do this professionally, then you can get away with an older GTX or RTX Nvidia card. I started with a 1050 Ti - 4GB and it was useless for 90% of my renders. VRAM is king with Daz and Iray only works with Nvidia and it's CUDA cores.
Like AllNatural just posted, a 12GB card is a nice start (and honestly, it's pretty much the bare minimum to render more than one Genesis character these days) - the vast majority of my production renders need ~11GB of Vram, but I sometimes nudge up to my 16GB max on my 4060 Ti.
Good luck finding any card over 12GB now, unless you search for used 3080's, 3090's etc. The 4060 Ti - 16GB I have; I bought new 1 year ago for $499 USD. If (And a big if) you can even find one still in stock somewhere, they are now running $1000 and up.
You can get away with CPU only rendering but be prepared for each render to take 2+ hours. Or you can work hard to split your renders up into multiple parts to render with an 8-12GB card and then stitch them together in post (Photoshop, etc).
Personally, I am gearing up for a new rendering PC and I am going to wait for DAZ to get the fix out for the 5000 cards first, then I'll probably buy a 5070 -16GB or higher.
One thing to mention - that doesn't get said often enough, IMO - is that you don't have to be focused on photo-realistic 3D renders, and thus be chained to Nvidia GPU's. For instance, there's new Filament toon style shaders in DAZ that let you do anime-like 2D style renders virtually instantly, with any GPU.
You can also focus on learning Blender instead. It renders fine with AMD cards, but Nvidia stuff is faster.
As for the rest of your PC... 32GB RAM minimum and a newer generation CPU. I'm still on an older 10th generation i3 and my viewport gets a bit laggy when I have a complicated scene. But basically anything 10th gen up with at least 4 cores works fine. You also want a good SSD at least. No spinners. DAZ deals with huge files and SSD's are the only way to go. Best option is an M.2 NVMe.
But basically, what you buy will be related to what your goals are. If you're just playing with DAZ as a hobby and not looking to do this professionally, then you can get away with an older GTX or RTX Nvidia card. I started with a 1050 Ti - 4GB and it was useless for 90% of my renders. VRAM is king with Daz and Iray only works with Nvidia and it's CUDA cores.
Like AllNatural just posted, a 12GB card is a nice start (and honestly, it's pretty much the bare minimum to render more than one Genesis character these days) - the vast majority of my production renders need ~11GB of Vram, but I sometimes nudge up to my 16GB max on my 4060 Ti.
Good luck finding any card over 12GB now, unless you search for used 3080's, 3090's etc. The 4060 Ti - 16GB I have; I bought new 1 year ago for $499 USD. If (And a big if) you can even find one still in stock somewhere, they are now running $1000 and up.
You can get away with CPU only rendering but be prepared for each render to take 2+ hours. Or you can work hard to split your renders up into multiple parts to render with an 8-12GB card and then stitch them together in post (Photoshop, etc).
Personally, I am gearing up for a new rendering PC and I am going to wait for DAZ to get the fix out for the 5000 cards first, then I'll probably buy a 5070 -16GB or higher.
One thing to mention - that doesn't get said often enough, IMO - is that you don't have to be focused on photo-realistic 3D renders, and thus be chained to Nvidia GPU's. For instance, there's new Filament toon style shaders in DAZ that let you do anime-like 2D style renders virtually instantly, with any GPU.
You can also focus on learning Blender instead. It renders fine with AMD cards, but Nvidia stuff is faster.
As for the rest of your PC... 32GB RAM minimum and a newer generation CPU. I'm still on an older 10th generation i3 and my viewport gets a bit laggy when I have a complicated scene. But basically anything 10th gen up with at least 4 cores works fine. You also want a good SSD at least. No spinners. DAZ deals with huge files and SSD's are the only way to go. Best option is an M.2 NVMe.
Yes, absolutely. I have the 4060 Ti with 16GB and it handles everything I can throw at it. It's just not as fast as the 4080's and 4090's. But it's plenty faster than the older 30's and 20's. Problem is finding one these days, as I mentioned above.
Alex021
New Member
- Mar 21, 2020
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- 29
Thank you too, i'm pretty sure i can get a 4060 16GB. checked your game and the quality is impressive, not the shapes i'd like to use but good anyways haha if that's done with a 4060ti I'll try to get closer.
- Jul 2, 2017
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I would rather use a 24Gb 3090 than a 16Gb 4060. The convenience of not having to mess with optimizing trumps render speed for me. For the quality of your renders, the hardware doesn't matter. The hardware is all about render speed and how much you can stuff into a scene. With characters, clothes, hairs, and a scene with environments both in the foreground and background, I run into trouble at around 4-6 characters onscreen.
- Aug 17, 2019
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We're looking at the days of 32GB being 'more than enough' getting close to end. If you're using a 16GB GPU, just go with 64GB (especially if you're looking at DDR4). You'll thank yourself later when you're multitasking while rendering. Hell, some days 96GB of RAM doesn't even feel lie enough for me. CPU is kind of whatever, my last system was using a 10700 and was fine. I'm sure an equivalent Ryzen would the trick.
4060ti is probably fine, depending on price. Locally, I'm seeing like $900. At which point, I'd start looking at a used 3090 as it'd be far more worth the money. But some people don't like the risk of buying used.
Anyway, I’d like to point something out. It all depends (like someone already said) on what you actually wanna do. If you’re thinking about making a game and rendering maybe thousands of images, then go all in. Get a graphics card with as much VRAM as possible... But if it’s just for the occasional image here and there, pretty much anything will get the job done...
This was rendered with optimization, tricks, and a ton of patience using a 2GB GTX 1050:
That’s basically several images rendered separately and then stitched together using external tools... Takes time, 'cause you still gotta optimize everything first.
This was done with a 12GB RTX 3060, just for testing—rendered in one go, no tricks, just some pre-optimization. All the characters are G8. You can fit more than 20 into the scene, but back then I only had 16GB of RAM and that wasn’t enough to really crowd it. Now with 32, maybe I could throw in 4 to 6 more before the GPU’s 12 gigs give out...
This was rendered with optimization, tricks, and a ton of patience using a 2GB GTX 1050:
That’s basically several images rendered separately and then stitched together using external tools... Takes time, 'cause you still gotta optimize everything first.
This was done with a 12GB RTX 3060, just for testing—rendered in one go, no tricks, just some pre-optimization. All the characters are G8. You can fit more than 20 into the scene, but back then I only had 16GB of RAM and that wasn’t enough to really crowd it. Now with 32, maybe I could throw in 4 to 6 more before the GPU’s 12 gigs give out...
Ya, sure... the 3090 was the flagship. But it's also 5 years old and out of production for a while now.
If you're comfortable paying $700 USD and up for a used card with no warranty and no idea how it was used ... well, then you have more money then I have to play with. I only make large money purchases on items I can return under warranty. The 3090 also sucks up almost 200 more watts then the 4060 and puts out a huge amount of heat. Both of which are concerns for me, since I have my work station in my bedroom.
As for optimization... I have done literally 7000+ production renders on my 4060 and have only run out of VRAM on maybe a dozen of them. And of those dozen, probably half were just DAZ's annoying memory leak which were fixed by a restart of DAZ.
I'm rendering a 1440p frame right now and it's 14.1 GB of VRAM (including the ~1.1GB or so that Windows, Firefox and a few other apps are using). To get to 6000 iterations is going to take about 20 mins. This is an important render so I am doing it full frame to best quality. I'll then run post filters and shrink it to 1080p for maximum detail.
Look at the texture list for this scene... it literally fills both my 24" monitors and most of those textures are 4K. All original - none optimized. And this scene still clocks in at 13GB'ish in VRAM.
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When I do get heavy slow downs because I am rendering several Genesis toons in a complicated environment, then I just do two layers. One with all the foreground elements (and any shadows they cast) and one of the background. Sometimes the sum of the parts is actually less than the total.
For example, I just did a series of animations in the same environment I showed the textures above for - The animation was magic fire rings dropping down like a cage over a G9 character. To get a 10 second clip at 30fps, it requires 300 frames and even if I only did 500 iterations with heavy denoising, that image series would have run 7+ hours. So I separated the floor and the foreground elements, and rendered them separately. Then I put the FG's on the background in Photoshop using an Action script. That saved me over 4 hours and is virtually indistinguishable from doing it all in a single pass.
(Segue - For anyone struggling with older GPU's to do complicated scenes - get a pirate copy of Photoshop and learn how to run Automated Batch scripts. It's an essential tool in this thing we do, believe me.)
So, once again - it really depends on how serious you want to get and what your budget is. I know lots of devs who have $10-20K invested in their rendering rig. Most indie devs are like me though... still working hard to get better and make more money. My budget was limited and the 4060Ti fit within that limitation while also giving me great performance. My next big purchase will be for a new PC and I will probably budget about $2500 for that, including a 5000 series GPU.
- Aug 17, 2019
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I think there's valid arguments for both, but with the prices as they are now, the value leans heavily in favor of a used 3090. Even looking passed the VRAM, the 3090 is going to remain relevant (by tech standards, at least.) quite a lot longer than the 4060 will. Heat is also valid, but obviously situational.
Not to poke at your workflow (especially if it works for you), but I feel like 6000 iterations is pretty high for 1440p. I tend to render in 4K at around 3500-4000 iterations, and that's probably still too much. For example:
I'd try playing around with your iterations and see if you can get it down a bit. It sounds like you could probably chop your render times down by at least a few minutes. But if it works for you, it works for you.
Ya, it's an abnormally high iteration count. I had some shadows that were stubborn with noise and this render is a gallery render so I was pushing it more than usual. Normally I render 1080p to 5 or 6000 and for the 1440p renders, I find 2500-3000 a sweet spot. And when I am just rendering characters alone to layer on a premade background, you sometimes only need 300-500 iterations. That's also usually what i use for animation frames. 500 iterations at 1440p and then run them thru the denoiser afterwards. I can usually keep the time down to about 1-2:00 per frame.
Velomous
Member
- Jan 14, 2024
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It's simple,
- get the most powerful nvidia gpu u can afford (this use case is why the rtx x090 and TITAN series exist btw, rendering & gaming as opposed to just gaming was the selling point for the titans originally I think, it was very popular among gamer 3D artists and just game devs in general).
- The most powerful cpu u can afford (intel or amd doesn't matter, amd is better tho imo; look up benchmarks n shit don't take my word for it)
- 64gb ram, 128gb if u got money left over.
That's it, in order of importance. if you were using anything else than daz to render the gpu wouldn't have to be nvidia; but they're usually the best anyways cuz cuda is more mature than rocm.
PS: Buying a used card being bad is a myth, read
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(His rate of getting bad gpus used was about the same as my rate of getting bad new ones over my lifespan); You should make sure the card works (ideally buy it from someone who allows you to return it if it's broken or run some benchmarks at the seller's pc with the card or something); even if it was used for crypto-mining 24/7 for several years, it isn't necessarily any worse off than a card that's been in a regular gaming pc used for games one hour a day for the same amount of time; hardware doesn't degrade that way. If anything, if it was used for crypto mining for several years there's no better endurance test to prove that the card is super solid. Just make sure it isn't an already broken card.Generally speaking, buying a used gpu is a completely solid option, it's the gpu manufacturers that do not want you to do it, so they started this rumor and a lot of people bought it.
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I'll just politely disagree strongly with you on this one.
Speaking as an engineer who worked in the aviation field for almost 30 years, I spent a very large percent of my time at work monitoring and maintaining components based on set life limits. Either cycles (landing and takeoffs) or hours of use. EVERYTHING has a life limit and we had to track and replace almost every single component on an aircraft based on those limits.
It's laughable saying a GPU used in a crypto-mining farm might be better off then a GPU used for only an hour each day. Even in solid state components, heat causes degradation of the materials. So does voltage spikes and excess current. You really have no idea how hot the used card you bought had ever reached, or if it's ever had a power spike because some duffus tried to hotswap a card or something equally dumb. There's also the resellers who take used cards and then replace fans or heat pipes to make them look new, but the same concerns are there... the underlying silicon and components are original and possibly near end of life. It's especially important with the way they layer PCB's these days. Heat can cause circuit paths to bleed through the layers.
I'm not saying there are not good used cards out there. But you have to do the calculus on whether the seller is trustworthy, and what the return policy is and how much the savings are compared to a new card with a warranty. Personally, once I am buying anything over $300, I tend to stick with new only. Unless it's local and I can test the item first before committing.
- Aug 17, 2019
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This isn't necessary at all (coming from someone who used a 10700 with 2 4090s for a bit), not with consumer/hobby software like Daz or Blender. In the case of consumer (non-Threadripper/etc.) chips, neither of these softwares care much at all about CPUs and actively prefer Nvidia GPUs. Even Maya is starting to lean into Nvidia.
From my experience, CPUs alongside a GPU slows things way down. You're just as good with a 11700 as you are with a 14900k.
Nvidia GPUs are the only option, and it's (currently) not particularly close. At all. AMD is just sad for anything that isn't gaming, and it's typically pretty bad at that, too.
Velomous
Member
- Jan 14, 2024
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Yeah I expected that; but there are quite a few cases where the cpu does matter in game development and in 3D design stuff as well. software rendering is occasionally used where the CPU is everything, and in game development a better cpu will help you greatly reduce compile times, which is also very nice unless you're using an interpreter powered engine like ren'py or html games.
While playing games the CPU can also become your bottleneck, e.g. your CPU will determine your maximum theoretical framerate and your GPU will determine your final framerate, you cannot play faster than your CPU allows, which perhaps is not so important for game development but if you have an expensive gpu it'd make sense to want to have a cpu that can fully utilize it. Perhaps rather than the best cpu you can get it'd be better to aim for a cpu that's appropriate for the gpu in this case I suppose.
There are just so many reasons to get a good CPU that I struggled not to recmmend getting the best one you can fit in your budget.
Yes, heat causes degradation, voltage spikes and excess current indeed damage over time. But the worst of the heat damage is mitigated if the card has been well cooled for it's lifespan and cryptominers who know what they're doing tend to undervolt their cards both for lower temps and to mitigate those power spikes.
If they didn't do that, they couldn't mine with them for years and the cards breaking down and needing to be replaced too frequently would fuck with their revenue. They need those cards to run cool if they want them to last a few years, which tends to leave them in good condition still once they decide to upgrade.
Everything has a life limit, but computer components like cpus and gpus tend to have a very long one as I'm sure you know, you'll have to work it for years or treat it exceptionally poorly for it to break down most of the time, mileage varies a bit I suppose. But I have never had a CPU fail on me (even some that had to work under quite extreme conditions where I was pretty sure they should have) and I have only once had a gpu begin to fail on me.
Generally speaking, if the card works without any clear issues when you get it, it'll likely last you for a year or two at least.