What is the best graphics card for renders?

megaplayboy10k

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My impression is that the Quadro is really overkill for basic 3d rendering...unless you're planning to do a lot of complex animations...then it's probably a good idea to have that overkill available. But most games have a (low)four digit number of total renders, a handful of short looping animations and maybe one semi-decent cinematic render. You can use a gamer card like the 2060-2080 series and do just fine.
 

Domiek

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My impression is that the Quadro is really overkill for basic 3d rendering...unless you're planning to do a lot of complex animations...then it's probably a good idea to have that overkill available. But most games have a (low)four digit number of total renders, a handful of short looping animations and maybe one semi-decent cinematic render. You can use a gamer card like the 2060-2080 series and do just fine.

Quadro GV 100 ~ $8,500
Octane Benchmark : 354
VRAM 16gb

RTX Titan ~ $2,500
Octane Benchmark : 324
Vram 24gb

Maybe Quadro line offers some sort of significant advantage in AI or some other field, but for general purpose 3D renders I don't think it should even be a consideration.

A couple of the upcoming 3090's with NVlink will cost about 1/3rd of one Quadro GV 100, offer an expected 1000-1300 Octane benchmark and give you combined 48gb ram. For the cost one of Quadro you could probably build a 2nd PC for a total of four 3090's and start a render network.
 

khumak

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I think if Nvidia decides to release some of the double memory variants of some of the new cards then there could be some interesting choices for rendering but when we're looking at a $1500 card with 24GB and then the next step down drops to 10GB, I think the 3090 is the pretty clear choice for a serious render box.

Now if you could get a 20GB 3080 or a 16GB 3070 for say $1000 or $700 then those would definitely be viable choices for people wanting a bit more of a budget option but there was no mention of those rumored variants. I suppose multi GPU is also an option but personally I don't think that's worth it unless you really are doing rendering as your full time job and every second of render time is money made or lost.
 
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megaplayboy10k

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Quadro GV 100 ~ $8,500
Octane Benchmark : 354
VRAM 16gb

RTX Titan ~ $2,500
Octane Benchmark : 324
Vram 24gb

Maybe Quadro line offers some sort of significant advantage in AI or some other field, but for general purpose 3D renders I don't think it should even be a consideration.

A couple of the upcoming 3090's with NVlink will cost about 1/3rd of one Quadro GV 100, offer an expected 1000-1300 Octane benchmark and give you combined 48gb ram. For the cost one of Quadro you could probably build a 2nd PC for a total of four 3090's and start a render network.
The Quadro 8000 runs 5k per, and two of them can be linked and provide up to 96GB of VRAM, which presumably is a huge asset when doing animations.
But, yeah, there are few projects in this field which would justify the expense.
 

Lewd4D

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There are already rumors about a 3070 with 16GB VRAM.

 

megaplayboy10k

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The next gen AMD cards are supposed to be able to do raytracing, and memory capacity is rumored around 8 to 16 GB. If they make an overclocked double GPU card with max RAM it might wind up being decent competition.
 

Lewd4D

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The next gen AMD cards are supposed to be able to do raytracing, and memory capacity is rumored around 8 to 16 GB. If they make an overclocked double GPU card with max RAM it might wind up being decent competition.
Well every GPU can do raytracing. The question is if AMD goes the same way as Nvidia and adds specific hardware for it on their GPU. Which would raise the next question if they have specific hardware does it work with Nvidia's raytracing.
 

khumak

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Well every GPU can do raytracing. The question is if AMD goes the same way as Nvidia and adds specific hardware for it on their GPU. Which would raise the next question if they have specific hardware does it work with Nvidia's raytracing.
There's also the matter of compatibility with DAZ3D. Most of the devs here use that I believe which makes any non NVIDIA card irrelevant regardless how good it is. Devs using Blender or some other less restrictive software would potentially have more options.
 

Lewd4D

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There's also the matter of compatibility with DAZ3D. Most of the devs here use that I believe which makes any non NVIDIA card irrelevant regardless how good it is. Devs using Blender or some other less restrictive software would potentially have more options.
DAZ itself works with every GPU. The only problem is the render engine Iray which uses the Cuda cores of Nvidia GPUs. You can always use a differnt engine like Octane or Vray but you also have to keep in mind that most of DAZ assets need new shaders then because they are made for Iray.
 

bcsjkdfjksh

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So um guys, whats the conclusion? I don't mind spending the money as long as it benefits me for the long term and kills it with DAZ rendering times and quality
 

baneini

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So um guys, whats the conclusion? I don't mind spending the money as long as it benefits me for the long term and kills it with DAZ rendering times and quality
3070/3080 have enough vram for gaming purposes, higher memory versions might come next year
3090 is for creators
amd is bankrupt
 

bcsjkdfjksh

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3070/3080 have enough vram for gaming purposes, higher memory versions might come next year
3090 is for creators
amd is bankrupt
Thank you, how applicable would the 3080 be for rendering. For now I only have a 970 GTX card or should I wait for the TI versions?

I don't use blender only DAZ btw
 

I'm Not Thea Lundgren!

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So um guys, whats the conclusion? I don't mind spending the money as long as it benefits me for the long term and kills it with DAZ rendering times and quality
If you want to future proof yourself (as much as you can with tech), go for the 3090.
Pair it with a Ryzen CPU and PCIe 4.0 Motherboard to get the best from the bandwidth on offer.
 

Lewd4D

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Thank you, how applicable would the 3080 be for rendering. For now I only have a 970 GTX card or should I wait for the TI versions?

I don't use blender only DAZ btw
The 3080 will be the second best consumer GPU you can get and ofc is very good for rendering. The only limiting factor would be the VRAM which is 10GB which is still mostly enough for GPU rendering.

There are rumors that there will be Ti or Super versions of the 3070/3080 with double the VRAM but nobody knows if and when they will come.
 
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megaplayboy10k

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If you want to future proof yourself (as much as you can with tech), go for the 3090.
Pair it with a Ryzen CPU and PCIe 4.0 Motherboard to get the best from the bandwidth on offer.
More specifically, the X570 is fully upgradeable and compatible with at least the upcoming Ryzens(and maybe one generation after that), supports PCIe 4.0 and can handle two GPUs and at least 128GB ram. The other Am4 mobos aren't necessarily compatible with the next Ryzens.
 

Domiek

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3090 X 2 if you can afford it. You can nvlink them for a combined 48gb memory meaning you can make huge scenes. 3080/3070 doesn't have nvlink so you're comparing a possible 48gb memory vs 16 or 10 or whatever the lesser cards have.

Render speed wise, all the cards are great and you'll be spending more time posing than actually rendering. Memory is really the most important thing here and is a no brainier if you can afford it.
 

I'm Not Thea Lundgren!

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3090 X 2 if you can afford it. You can nvlink them for a combined 48gb memory meaning you can make huge scenes. 3080/3070 doesn't have nvlink so you're comparing a possible 48gb memory vs 16 or 10 or whatever the lesser cards have.

Render speed wise, all the cards are great and you'll be spending more time posing than actually rendering. Memory is really the most important thing here and is a no brainier if you can afford it.
I'm now wondering if the Quadro cards are going to get an update too; the current RTX king is the RTX8000 with it's 48GB of RAM; two of those with an NVLink would be pretty cool, but if they updated the architecture to be similar to the 3090; just imagine what you could do with that setup! :eek: ;)
 
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Domiek

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I'm now wondering if the Quadro cards are going to get an update too; the current RTX king is the RTX8000 with it's 48GB of RAM; two of those with an NVLink would be pretty cool, but if they updated the architecture to be similar to the 3090; just imagine what you could do with that setup! :eek: ;)
I'm not a greedy man. I'll move up from 11gb to 48gb for $2800 and consider myself hashtagblessed
 

megaplayboy10k

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I'm now wondering if the Quadro cards are going to get an update too; the current RTX king is the RTX8000 with it's 48GB of RAM; two of those with an NVLink would be pretty cool, but if they updated the architecture to be similar to the 3090; just imagine what you could do with that setup! :eek: ;)
I assume they will, but not necessarily this year. They may want to milk some value out of the old models first.
 

khumak

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I'm still kind of leaning towards waiting til Big Navi comes out. According to the rumor mills I've been listening to, the Navi equivalent to the 3080 is supposed to have 16GB of VRAM. So it wouldn't surprise me at all if we see a 20GB 3080Ti come out around that time to rain on AMD's parade. Obviously they'll charge extra for double the ram but I have to imagine it'll be significantly less than $1500.

The 3080 already looks like a great card for gaming. But for rendering it really needs more ram IMO. 20GB is probably more than I need but 10GB is definitely less than what some of my unoptimized renders require. Time spent optimizing is time wasted IMO. I may still just wind up going with the 3090 since that's a sure thing. It's overkill for gaming IMO but for rendering $1500 actually seems pretty reasonable for what you're getting.