New Iray and Nvidea CardQuestion
Rockitscience
Posts: 20
Now that the 4 6 and 8 Gig Nvidea cards are available are you seeing a good amount of Iray render speed increase between the 2 and 4 gig cards and more importantly the 6 and 8 gig cards.
I am trying to make a determination as to if it's worth the 500+ dollar investment
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Render speed in Iray is pretty much directly proportional to the number of CUDA cores, IF the scene fits in the card memory. No one knows how fast the new 10 series cards will be because Nvidia hasn't yetreleased Iray drivers for those.
There is some thought the the Pascal (10 series) cards will be noticably faster foa a given number of CUDA cores than comparable Maxwell cards (current generation). GPU speed also plays a part and the clock frequencies for the Pascal cards are higher than for Maxwell cards.
How much is your time worth?
The 10x0 cards are not yet supported for Iray, so tests with those are not available.
2GB is very limiting - Daz recommends 4GB.
I am hearing that 6 GB cards arent supported? is that correct - is there a specific NVidea card that I should be Eyballing at this time?
For Animation - SciFi so likely lots of metals at various points
The 6GB 980TI, and the 12GB TitanX, are supported - it's the new 10x0 cards (regardless of memory) that aren't (yet).
So how do we feel about this card
NVIDIA GeForce GT730 4GB GDDR5 128Bit PCI Express Video Graphics Card
@ Rockitscience
Something must be wrong on the ebay offer. The card is quite old and specified to have 1 GB VRAM (one!), not 4. Not one of the fastest cards....
http://www.geforce.com/hardware/desktop-gpus/geforce-gt-730/specifications
I have a 750 GTX (I think, not certain about the letters) so that's a couple of steps up the range and not exactly super-fast (I've been testing out the G3F hairs I had stacked up and half-hour renders are pretty common, with just G3F and the hair).
I clicked off the CPU in Render settings and just left my GTX 965M card clicked, it wont render. Does that mean my graphic card is bad? Is it using the graphic card at all?
It may be running out of memory - do you know how much the 965M nominally uses (I expect it's actually part of the system RAM)?
I just took out 8 Ram and put in 32 . . . would that have something to do with it?
No, the GPU wil use a limitied amount of RAm - no more than 4GB and possibly less.
The 780 TI so far is the gaming-level card with the most CUDA cores - 2880 - aside from the 1080 and 980 TI. However, 780 TIs only came in 3GB, though I've seen rumors of a 6GB version, but have never found one on Nvidia's site. Aftermarket vendors like EVGA or MSI might have gotten custom-spec 6GB models, but as I said, I've never seen one for sale, and everyone I talk to about it agrees that it's just marketing smoke and not really using more than the 3GB because of the chipset/bios on the card itself.
I did see render speeds increase when I was using 2 780 TIs, but you are still limited to the amout of memory on the GPU, and 2 3GB cards does not equal 6GB. The Cores stack somewhat, which is where the extra speed comes from, but as soon as your scene goes over the 3GB limit, it dumps off to the CPU. As well, mec4d had some interesting things to say in another thread regarding the capabilities of the CPU with respect to bandwidth of the PCI bus for your GPU. Basically if the bandwidth isn't fully utilized, the GPU won't be used at 100%, which means a weaker card running at full potential will outperform a stronger card running at only 30% of its potential.
I can verify the new Pascal Titan X is useless in DS at this time. DS sees it, but Iray ignores it completely. Setting that as my sole rendering device, I get a blank screen. From what I can tell, they don't even have game ready drivers for it, at least for Fallout 4. Geforce Experience's Game Optimization function wants to set my Fallout 4 to less than it was with a 980 and calls that optimized. The launcher doesn't even recognize it and defaults to Low.
Carmageddon Reincarnated looks beautiful on the Pascal Titan X, however.
If you want a strong GPU for rendering, look first at the CUDA cores and then the memory on it. An 8 GB card with 1200 cores will not always be better than a 4GB card with 2400 cores, but again, it depends on how efficient the overall system is.
You can also explore external GPU options if your computer supports Thunderbolt.
However, since you say you're interested in doing animations, the card has less to do with rendering in that respect than the CPU, as animations process faster when written to disk rather than the screen. You still get all the Iray benefits with direct-to-disk CPU-only rendering, you just won't see it until all frames of the animation have completely rendered.
Nvidia released IRay developer SDK 2016.2 on July 25, https://developer.nvidia.com/iray-sdk It supports Pascal architecture. I imagine the Daz dev team is working feverishly away to implement Pascal support. I've had a few issues with IRay recently and the responses I've gotten from support are couched in language like, "thanks for your patience". I get the feeling they're really pushing to get this out. Something to look forward to. Nothing to do now but be patient.
For my part, I was comparing buying a 980Ti to waiting for support for the 10 series. Given that the prices for a 980 Ti haven't come down very much - I'm playing the waiting game. Hope IRay is amazing running on Pascal hardware. Hope. Only time will tell.
if you've been watching sales, 980TI's have been available for about $200 USD less than 1080s or previous 980TI prices. Got mine for $420
No, the SDK was not released then - it was announced as I understand it.
Yes, after looking more deeply I think you're right. It's very hard to tell. What threw me off is the announcement post on July 25, is all written in past tense - like the release already happened. I had to dig a lot further to find some blog post that suggests it might be released at the end of this month. Very confusing. Thanks for correcting me.
I assume you're talking about eBay? Everywhere I look the 980 Ti is still running $600. Can you post a link of where you found one for $420? Even on eBay I can't find used ones for any less than $350 or so. I'm not a fan of spending that much for a used piece of hardware - not knowing if some overclocker has been cooking the life out of it for years or not. Just say'n.
As far as comparing it to the 1080 - I believe the current meme is that the 1070 is performing better than the 980 Ti, and you can buy those all day long brand new for $400 to $450. If only IRay supported Pascal! Arrrrggghhh? Oh well. Waiting, waiting, waiting....
Yes, this has sown confusion generally.