Ryzen 7 1800x + 3Dlight / GTX 1080 ti + Iray : Wich one is faster?

Hi,

I'm updating my PC so I'm asking myself wich one is faster : CPU rendering with Ryzen 7 and 3Dlight, or GPU rendering with Iray?

Rendering quailty is not a big deal for me since I'm not a real 3D graphist, but today I got an AMD GPU so Can't use Iray on it. CPU Iray is about 12 times slower than CPU 3Dlight.

So could someone tell me how fast do you render a basic scene (ex: Default G8, no clothes or hair, defqult pose, default cam, default light, res 4096 x 4096) using 3Dlight+Ryzen, and then same scene with GTX 1080 ti + Iray?

Thanks!

Comments

  • Thanks, but unless I missed something, there's no 3Dlight comparison in the link you posted.

    I know Iray renders much faster on a GPU than on a CPU, but what I would like to know is : can GPU Iray be faster than CPU 3Dlight?

  • ebergerlyebergerly Posts: 3,255

    I have a Ryzen machine with a Ryzen 7 1700, plus a GTX 1080ti and a GTX 1070. If I can figure out how to do 3DLight renders I'll use the benchmark scene with the 1080ti and try to answer your question. Though I know nothing about 3DLight, so I'm not sure if the benchmark scene works with 3DLight...

  • Thanks a Lot! You just have to select 3Dlight instead of Iray. Don't bother to set anything else, default settings will be more than enough. 

  • ebergerlyebergerly Posts: 3,255

    Okay, I started with the GTX 1080ti rendering the benchmark scene (no GPU), and it took 1:55 (just under 2 minutes).

    Then I changed to 3Delight, and apparently that only uses the CPU. Right now the same scene is using all 16 threads of my Ryzen at 100%, and after 4 minutes it's only at 14% rendered.

    So, as suspected, rendering with even a 8 core/16 thread CPU is not even close to using a GPU. 

    Now, keep in mind I have no clue if there's something about 3Delight that doesn't like the benchmark scene, or if there are some other settings I should be changing. But just switching to 3Delight gives these results.

    BTW, it's now 6 minutes, all threads are still at 100%, and it's only 14% rendered. 

  • ebergerlyebergerly Posts: 3,255

    Okay I gave up at 6 minutes. I'm guessing at that rate it will take 30-60 minutes to complete the render. Compared to 2 minutes with a GPU. Plus it blocks all threads of your CPU so your computer becomes pretty unresponsive. 

  • So GPU Iray is freaking faster than CPU 3Dlight!

    In the bench scene, there's indeed something 3Dlight doesn't like : Lights^^

    I guess It could be a bit faster by setting 3Dlight properly, but that would not change that much... So thanks again, I was hesitating between AMD RX Vega 64 and GTX 1080 ti, but now I'm sure, I'll use Iray so AMD isn't an available option. too bad.

     

  • Given that Iray and 3Delight are very diffrent engines I'm not sure a single scene can give a useful comparison. If you do want to do a test it may be worh making sure Progressive Rendering is on for one run, as it can make a huge difference to some scenes (but it can also add noise).

  • ebergerlyebergerly Posts: 3,255
    edited November 2017

    Thanks Richard. I see Progressive Rendering in the Render Settings, and the label seems darkened like it's not enabled. But I can't see an "enable" setting, just a ton of other settings under Update and Completion. Is there a magic setting to enable?

    EDIT: Nevermind....I forgot to switch to 3Delight....smiley

    Post edited by ebergerly on
  • Thanks, didn't know about progressive rendering. So I just tried an example scene : default G2 (no clothes, no hair, no pose...), Yosemite landscape (including two lights and a shadow plane setted for 3Dlight) :

    - 3Dlight normal rendering : about 1 min 10 seconds

    - 3Dlight progressive rendering : about 2 minutes.

    So I guess progressive rendering should be used in specific cases ... But what I note here is that even if 3Dlight can be configurated much better to render faster, it must be at least 10 times faster in order to compete with Iray speed...

  • ebergerlyebergerly Posts: 3,255
    edited November 2017

    Yeah, I'm doing the Iray benchmark scene referenced in the other thread, using 3Delight, and with Progressive Rendering enabled, at almost 20 minutes it's still at only less than 80% complete. So yeah, in this case it seems faster, but render time is still pretty painful compared to the 2 minutes GTX 1080ti. But again, I may be missing a crucial setting. 

    Post edited by ebergerly on
  • Yes, plus a detail : normal 3Dlight rendering is almost linear (if you need 10 minutes to render 50%, that mean you need 20 minutes to render 100%). Progressive rendering is not linear at all : you could render 50% in 2 minutes, and last 5% in 3...

  • ebergerlyebergerly Posts: 3,255

    Yeah, I'm noticing that....still at 81%, but it's been 34 minutes so far...

  • ebergerlyebergerly Posts: 3,255

    Sorry, after 39 minutes I'm gonna shut this down. And honestly the resulting image at 85% complete looks pretty horrendous IMO. Again, maybe I'm missing something...

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  • yeah 39 minutes for a single render is... a bit to much. I don't think you're missing anything. I'm not a Daz pro, but I use it for years now, and I always had that problem : one, two, three characteres + clothes and hair are rendering pretty "fast" with 3Dlight, but just try to had lights / shadows and bam! you need a supra-calculator to render you're scene^^. Now try to imagine that CPU Iray is about 12 times slower than 3Dlight !

    I thought GPU rendering was much faster, but needed a confirmation. GPU architecture is more "limited" than CPU, but a GPU can do  billions of parallel treatments. That's why they are used in several domains like mining, data encryption, deep learning etc...

  • Progressive can be faster with "complex" lighting - stuff like uberEnvironment for example - or shaders. Not in a recent build but I had one scene go from not complete after two hours to taking ten or fifteen minutes to finish (and not too noisy).

  • In term of pure rendering power, the GTX 1080 Ti should be 10-40x quicker than a CPU to shoot rays in pathtracing

    But still you can achieve a decent render speed with 3delight if you have appropriate shaders and scene setup

    Progressive rendering uses the pathtracing engine of 3delight, but to really get the benefit, you need some shaders specifically writen for that

    I made a short video to demonstrate what you can do with 3delight and an old Phenom 955 BE wich should be more than 4x slower than a Ryzen 1800x

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4nPRCCrYlE

  • BeeMKayBeeMKay Posts: 7,019

    3Delight can be pretty fast, if you don't set shading settings too high. But you have to invest a lot more work into setting up lighting properly, compared to Iray.

    It looks, of course, very different, too.

    But if your kind of artwork doesn't require the looks of Iray, then I can recommend this light set for fast renders: https://www.daz3d.com/advanced-daz-studio-light-bundle

    and https://www.daz3d.com/advanced-light-presets-for-aoa-s-lights

  • Thanks for details. The thing is that I'm not really confortable with lights / shaders. In fact, My first use of DAZ is exporting assets to my own real time 3D engine (By the way, I'd love to be able to export shaders too, but I think they won't be GLSL translatable) . So I still have lots of renders to do for personal use (like drawing a character morph and save a preview), but rendering quality doesn't really matter in that purpose. Speed is the most important thing for me, and it seems that GPU rendering is really faster than CPU.

    I tested openGL rendering too, but I don't see the point. It take me around 1 to 3 seconds to render a default character in Daz, whereas I can display a full stuffed, animated and morphed Daz character at 500 fps on my engine. More than that, OpenGL rendering is totally unusable (so uggly), hairs are bugged because of alpha tests not computed etc...

    So Iray seems to be cool! The only time I tested it, it took me one hour to render a simple character! (CPU : slow slow slow slow slow)

  • BeeMKayBeeMKay Posts: 7,019

    Well, you don't have to do big things with the AOA lights. I usually load one ambient light into the scene, set it to 30% and give it a very tiny amount of blue (simulating sky), and then a distant light with a slight yellow. You can set the distant light in the viewport similar to a camera and set it so it lights up the character properly.

    REndering times are usually withing the range of up to ten minutes on my CPU; something similar in Iray would need several hours.

  • TheKDTheKD Posts: 2,691

    3DL can be very fast and nice looking, but it takes a lot of knowhow with scene prep and stuff. Iray seems a lot easier to learn. Only real rule of thumbs to get good looking fast renders for iray seems to be use lots of light, even for dark scenes, then it takes 5 seconds in PS to make it darker.

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