video card for iray render info

[FranceToast]

Just a note on the RTX 20xx cards...

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Of course, at the end of the day it all comes down to budget, so the 2080 Ti might be more than you are willing to spend in the first place, then there's the question of whether getting 2 1080 Ti's is a better choice than a single 2080 Ti...

Thanks for the link-interesting benchmarks so far!

I'm curious how you are all doing multiple cards without SLI - I have an MSI 1080Ti OC now, but still have my MSI 980Ti OC it replaced. I got these for gaming (new to rendering) and there was no reason to have mixed cards (or same cards SLI'ed for that matter) for the games I played. But people in that thread have mixed cards and are using them at the same time for rendering? How does that work exactly? I could just put my 980Ti back in my computer (I have adequate power for both) and Daz3D will find it as a rendering source?

 

[OhWee]

@ FranceToast

Essentially you can mix a number of cards. Some crazy man benched a 1080, 1080 Ti AND a 2080 Ti together (or something like that). The results are in the Daz Iray Benchmarks thread on the Daz Forum.

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A bit earlier in that thread, some guy benched 3 1080 Tis and a Titan XP together as well. Again, crazy fast.

Note that when you are mixing cards like this, it's the one with the least ram that sets the max size of the scene.

Supposedly the 2080 Ti's can 'combine' their memory for larger scenes, but there's not a lot of info about that as of yet. At least not that I've noticed on the Daz forum anyways. I seem to remember that some guy Frankensteined some code together to get it to work, and of course had the NVLink widget, but it's not an official thing. I could be wrong about that though.

But as long as you have the PCIe-16 slots available, and enough PCIE e lanes to run the cards at x8 or x16 (x4 might be possible, but I haven't seen anything like that, might be a mining rig result somewhere in the Daz Iray benchmark thread). If Daz can 'see' the cards, it's a simple matter of checking the boxes for each Nvidia card that you want to participate in the render. My (desktop replacement) laptop does just fine with it's dual 1080s rendering together in Daz. I even do some light (non-resource intensive) gaming on the side while I'm waiting on renders...

I've seen it mentioned in a few places that using more than 4 graphics cards can have some issues (not enough memory addresses for all of that VRAM or something like that) but there are workarounds for that. Really, though, after the 3rd card you've entered overkill terrritory...

 

[FranceToast]

@ FranceToast
Note that when you are mixing cards like this, it's the one with the least ram that sets the max size of the scene.

Ah....giving up my 11GB might be a tough thing, lol.

 

[OhWee]

Ah....giving up my 11GB might be a tough thing, lol.

I can relate. The 6.4 GB of VRAM (after the Windows VRAM tax) for my 1080s, well I max that out often enough to find it very annoying. Ideally, staying with the same cards I would think would be better r.e. driver interactions, but there's a few people mixing cards on the Daz forum. Crazy people anyways!