Rendering and hardware

[BitterSweep]

Hello,
I have to get a new setup for Daz Studio, since my rendiring times are abysmal with my current PC, yes it's a little old.
I am wondering What kind of hardware it's better for high quality iray 2k renders.

I think 32GB ram are enough (are they?)
I was thinking about buying a ryzen CPU (or are Intel more performing?)

Now the main question is the GPU, since there is a shortage of NVIDIA cards I really do not know what to buy, and how much does VRAM influence render performance and quality?
For example is it better a 2080TI with 11G VRAM or a 3070 with 8GB, and why?
Also, aren't QUADRO cards better for rendering?

Thank you for your answers, if possible include your current rig specs and your thoughts

 

[Rich]

Since you're talking about GPU's, I'm assuming you're rendering using Daz Studio. If I've guessed wrong, some of the below may not be correct.

RAM: If you get 32Gb, possibly get it with fewer, larger DIM's so that you leave yourself open slots. That way if you later decide you need 64Gb, you can just buy a couple more DIMs and add them. But RAM is your friend, so you might consider just going with 64 from the start - I doubt it'd add that much to the cost of your system.

From a rendering point of view, the differences between a Ryzen CPU and an Intel CPU are unlikely to be noticeable. Much of Daz Studio is single-threaded, so having more cores in your CPU won't necessarily change its performance. And, as you're obviously aware, the real factor in render speed is your GPU, not your CPU.

The amount of VRAM doesn't affect render quality directly. What it affects is how big a scene will fit into your GPU. The entire scene has to fit, or else Daz Studio will fall back to CPU rendering. But you can do a LOT in 8Gb - the cards I'm using are 8Gb cards, and I rarely have issue. Granted, I've used Scene Optimizer to reduce textures of some assets to less stupid levels (who needs a 4K texture on a pencil or a button?) So, yes, if you had 11Gb instead of 8Gb, you wouldn't have to worry about your scene fitting quite so much. But, the only reason more VRAM would result in better quality is if you're able to use bigger textures. But you can do very nice, complex renders in 8Gb if you do a bit of work with Scene Optimizer.

From a performance point of view, there are a lot of variables, but in simple terms, the 3070 is going to render faster than the 2080 Ti. The 3070 has more CUDA cores (5888 vs 4372) so a simplistic calculation would suggest that it would render ~30 percent faster than the 2080 Ti at the same clock speed. But the 3070 also has a later-generation chip, which has some effect. If you go over to the Daz forums, there's a thread there where people post performance numbers of actual renders (there's a standard "test image" that's used), so you can get a much more accurate estimate of render speed.

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Unfortunately, I don't see any entries there for the 3070, but you'd expect it to be between the 3060 and 3080, both of which are listed there. Those numbers suggest that the 3070 would iterate maybe 40% faster than the 2080 Ti. (somewhere between 10.6 and 12 iterations/second as compared to 7.5)

Of course, the 3070 also may cost more than the 2080 Ti, so you have to decide if the additional speed boost is worth the cost. I'm running dual GTX1080's (older rig), which, when combined, are lower performance than a single 2080Ti, so don't think that the 2080 Ti is in any way a crap card.

Late-model QUADRO cards will do nicely rendering-wise, but they tend to be more expensive than the comparable gaming card, and won't necessarily outperform a gaming card.

And, finally, don't forget a big hard drive, since you'll probably be accumulating assets. LOL I have an SSD for my boot disk, but have a big old-fashioned rotating drive for my D:, and that's where I store all my Daz assets. "Rotating vs SSD" won't make a difference in rendering speed - it might cause a scene to load just a tiny bit slower, but large SSD's are expensive.

 

[BitterSweep]

Thank you Rich. Your answer is what I was searching for.
Thank you a lot. Yes I was talking about DAZ

30XX series are better but I am worried about market shortage, I don't know if I can find one for a reasonable price. We will see.
Also I see a really close performance between 3060ti and 3080 on the daz forum for what I assume is the same file:
W10 2004 456.55 4.12.2.051 Beta x64 NA 2 minutes 38.53 seconds 149.234 12.062 9.296 (3080)
W10 Iron 457.51 4.14.?.??? ???? x64 NA 2 minutes 53.70 seconds 169.040 10.648 4.660 (3060TI)
So maybe i will opt for a 3060ti

EDIT:
Nevermind 30XX are sold out everywhere, only secondary market available and I do not want to spend 1K for a 3060 that originally costed 399.
What are good alternatives? I think not AMD cards since iray

 

[DSSAlex]

I'm in the middle of building a new PC for DAZ and I've ended up with a Ryzen 7 with 32G of ram. It has a potato for a GPU (it's an old leftover GTX750 if you're that curious) at current it works for CPU rendering. Hopefully I can grab a 3K series card eventually.

The GPU market (and really any chips in general) right now is a bloodbath. There's a general shortage of chip dies as well as various crypto bullshit that's keeping the market inflated. Retailers are using various tactics to keep scalpers at bay but it's not really helping. Supposedly the die shortage should come to an end sometime next year and the whole crypto market is made entirely of wind and ghosts (and so could collapse at any time). Of course that also means any secondhand cards have probably been going 24/7 since they were purchased and are immediately suspicious in all contexts. Who even fucking knows.

 

[Rich]

Thank you Rich. Your answer is what I was searching for.
Thank you a lot. Yes I was talking about DAZ

30XX series are better but I am worried about market shortage, I don't know if I can find one for a reasonable price. We will see.
Also I see a really close performance between 3060ti and 3080 on the daz forum for what I assume is the same file:
W10 2004 456.55 4.12.2.051 Beta x64 NA 2 minutes 38.53 seconds 149.234 12.062 9.296 (3080)
W10 Iron 457.51 4.14.?.??? ???? x64 NA 2 minutes 53.70 seconds 169.040 10.648 4.660 (3060TI)
So maybe i will opt for a 3060ti

EDIT:
Nevermind 30XX are sold out everywhere, only secondary market available and I do not want to spend 1K for a 3060 that originally costed 399.
What are good alternatives? I think not AMD cards since iray

When looking at the performance numbers, be a tiny bit wary of comparing renders from two different versions of Daz Studio, since they may have different versions of iRay, which complicates matters. That big table early in the thread lists the iRay version across the top, so your most accurate comparison will be within the same column.

Well, if the 30x0's are out, then you're back to the 20x0 series. If you're going to be using iRay, you have to have an NVidia card - no other type of card will be supported.

An alternate, of course (although it's a bit more work) is to look into alternate renderers. There are people who've had good luck with the Octane renderer and getting Daz assets into it, but its a reasonable amount of work. Another option would be to look at pushing the assets over into Blender and rendering with Cycles or Eevee. Daz publishes converters that will do the characters, and I think the Diffeomorphic (

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) plugin may convert non-numan assets. (Not 100% sure.) If you're using a renderer other than iRay, a wider audience of GPU cards will work. (Blender supports quite a few different manufacturers.) I realize this path isn't as easy as Daz Studio, but it is possible...

 

[Innocent Chloe]

I know you are asking about Daz but should you ever want to go for Blender in the future on that PC then this information will be helpful to you;

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The smaller bars is better as it represents a shorter render time. So as example, the fastest GPU for Blender rendering right now is the RTX 3090 which hits about 150 second render time for the benchmark scenes. Compared to an RTX 2080 ti which takes 300 seconds for the same benchmark. The reason you see the card on there twice is due to the Nvidia GPU model and then you have the third party factory overclocked models which reach higher clock speeds thus get better render times (Asus/MSI/EVGA/etc...)

For the rest Rich has already given the best advice so I can't add much more value beyond what Rich has already stated.

I will say this though; GPU availability should improve within the next 3 to 6 months if the leaks are to believed about RTX 3080 Ti cards already being shipped out. Hopefully those will have built in mining limiters and thus will not be gobbled up by crypto miners.

I would say it is best to wait rather than go for an RTX 2080 as those are also hard to find and overly expensive while the RTX 3070-3080 just perform so much better, I would not go used as you run the risk of buying a card that has been burnt out due to crypto mining. So ideally just wait for RTX 3080/3070 or RTX 3080/3070 Ti to become available again at MSRP (retail recommended price).

 

[OhWee]

Not getting my hopes up yet, but...

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If the bubble does indeed finally burst, this will do a couple of things:

1) Cryptominers will stop hoovering up GPUs, which should improve availability in the coming months.

2) Cryptominers will then start unloading boatloads of GPUs, which will flood Ebay and such with cheap cards, which will drive the prices down drastically. MSRP for new cards will be a thing again (finally), and cheaper than MSRP might start happening again as well on slightly dated cards.


This is what happened the last couple of times the bubbles burst, but I don't want to get my hopes up yet. Cryptocurrency values were WAAAAAAAY up there until recently, so they have a long way to fall before it becomes not very cost effective to mine...

One note: A LOT of gamers, 3D artists, etc. are 'in the cue' waiting for cards to drop in price, so this time there may be a bit more of a lag on prices coming down, assuming that the crypto bubble does indeed fully burst. Scalpers won't give up until they too are sitting on a glut of cards that they can't get rid of for more than they paid for them.


As to the OP's questions, my usual two cents (that's you BitterSweep !) :

1) Get the card with the most VRAM that you can afford. I have to add 'to a point' with the addition of the 20+ GB cards. Most people can be perfectly content with say a 11 GB 1080 Ti/2080 Ti, or even a 10GB 3080 (when/if prices finally drop on those to around MSRP).

As noted, the 30xx cards are the ones you really want, but a 16xx or 10xx card can get the job done. Earlier cards too, to a point anyways.

2) 16 GB of system ram is workable, 32 GB is preferable, over 32 GB is nice but in a lot of cases overkill.

3) If you plan to stick with this 3D rendering hobby, don't 'cheap out' on storage. I now have over 4 TB of Daz assets, between assets I've acquired and scenes that I've saved. I am currently working on an external 5400 RPM HDD, and it's a bit painful to wait on the searches, but at least it holds all of my Daz assets (It's a 7.5 TB drive). I do plan to get some faster storage soon. At the very least, I wouldn't recommend anything less than 2 TB, an SSD would be nice but spinning rust (HDDs) will work fine, just bit more noticeably slower.

4) Make sure you have additional storage to back up your Daz assets (backup drive). Nothing sucks more than a hard drive failure wiping out all of your hard work.

5) I recommend installing all of your Daz assets onto the same drive, one that you can transplant to another system later if needed. I did this to an external drive recently, it's a bit of a pain to get Daz to move the database onto the same drive (if not your C: drive), but once it's done, this will allow you to move your Daz install from system to system a bit easier.


One other note, if you want to try other rendering engines (3Delight, Filament maybe), then you can bypass the need for an expensive GPU, just get the CPU with the most cores that you can afford. Those 16 core Ryzens are pretty handy for CPU based rendering. Many people prefer Iray (myself included), but 3Delight and Filament can give your game a different look, which can help it stand out a bit from the pack maybe.

Also, don't cheap out on the power supply if you are planning on multiple GPUs at some point. Daz Iray will use as many CUDA cores as you can throw at it, which can drop your rendering times. A few people actually have 3-4 cards in their systems for rendering. The VRAM won't stack, but the CUDA cores will...


I think that covers it. Here's to hoping that the crypto boom is over, unless you are one of those developers that banks in crypto land of course! Not getting my hopes up quite yet though!