looking a list of the graphic card that can/will take advantage of rendering in Daz + bench marks
myotherworld
Posts: 606
so following on from another discussion in the commons.
i have looked , really I have . but I cannt find anything that helps.
i am looking for, If here is such a thing a list of the graphic card that can/will take advantage of rendering in Daz
also before I go and blow £500 som bench marks on the differant cards V render times?
will a 3080 nvidia card be that much faster then a i7 8 core CPU with 32 Gb of ram?
Sorry if I am asking a lot or if it has been asked before ( as I said I have looked)
Thanks for any help. hope your weekend is going well
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Funny, those are the specs of my machine. I used memory, memory bandwidth, and Blender render benchmarks to pick my GPU (https://techgage.com/article/mid-2021-gpu-rendering-performance/). A note about VRAM (you've probably already read in the forums), in my experience: wicked fast when the scene fits in the card's VRAM and slow but usable when it's bigger. I bring that up as a caveat, scene memory size matters with smaller scenes best using that GPU and large ones your beefy machine stats. As a n00b, it frustrated me that my fancy GPU didn't make all my renders faster and some (inexplicably back then) still took forever to render. Hope all that rambling helps.
Although some GTX cards do render Iray, one looses an additional 1GB of VRAM as the missing RTX functions must be emulated in software - It is better to get a RTX card.
Absolute minimum amount of VRAM on RTX card is 6GB's, but as the OS, DS and needed "Working Space" take about 3GB's, the remaining 3GB's is not a lot with the latest products.
Does not matter how fast the card is if the scene does not fit in the available VRAM as the rendering will drop to CPU at 20+ slower speed.
The best bang for a buck is the 12GB RTX 3060.
Yes, a 3080 will be leaps and bounds faster than a CPU processor. I have an i9 processor with a 3090, if I just used the CPU on a render, it would take about 2 or 3 hours to get comparable to maybe 1 to 3 minutes with my 3090.
I have a 5800X and an RTX 3060. The graphics card is between 20x and 40x faster than the CPU
Have we forgotten about the benchmark thread? https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/341041/daz-studio-iray-rendering-hardware-benchmarking/p1
You can find the answer to all your questions here. Download the benchmark scene, follow the instructions. Run the bench with your current machine. Then look at other people's posted marks and compare.
And with that info you can quickly make an estimate as to how much faster a 3080 or whatever GPU can be. If you are talking about a CPU, um, yeah, the 3080 is going to be literally 40 times FASTER. Iray is a GPU focused render engine and no CPU on the planet is remotely close to a 3080 when it comes to rendering Iray.
As far as to a list, that is very simple. It has to be Nvidia based, and it has to be the 900 series or newer. Quadros and A series work as well, but these are expensive professional cards that do not offer any benefits over the gaming cards for Iray, other than possibly more VRAM. The 900 series released in 2014 and is going to have support cut soon, so don't get one of those. The RTX cards render much, much faster than any non RTX card, but you will see this in the benchmarks.
The other metric to look at is VRAM. If your scene is bigger than the VRAM capacity of your GPU, it will not render the scene at all. So VRAM is the other important metric to look at for any GPU purchase. There is no easy way to say how much is enough for you, because everybody is different. If you are trying to recreate an epic battle from Lord of the Rings you will be out of luck with Iray.
I went through a few pages of that thread and collated these:
(various older versions of Studio, various older versions of Iray and older version of the test scene)
I notice that there is no 3070 on there, In stores the only 3060 ti and 3070 ti cards that I can find are 8GB variants.
Would the 3070 performance be much different from the 3060 if they both only have 8GB?
The amount of memory has no effect on speed of GPU.
The 3060 is an anomaly with 12GB while the faster 3060ti, 3070 and 3070ti only ever came with 8GB.
I expect the 3070 would slot right in below the 3080, with the 3070ti squeezing in between the two.
I'm sure you know this, but perhaps not the OP: That's only true if the scene fits in VRAM.
Interesting...
So, GPU (preferably RTX) is 20x (or more) faster than CPU rendering..
Only when the scene fits in the VRAM.. otherwise it's the same as a CPU render..
And when the scene fits in VRAM, some cards are faster than others (re: benchmarks e.g. 3080 faster than 3060)..
But.. a scene using 11GB VRAM would render faster in an RTX3060 (12GB VRAM) than in an RTX3080(10GB VRAM) because the 3080 would drop to a CPU render.
So, there is an argument for the 3060 if you know you will be rendering heavy scenes.. wish I knew that earlier.
If the scene doesn't fit in the VRAM, the GPU stops taking part in rendering and the CPU continues (if fallback to CPU is enabled)
If the scene is using 11GB's of VRAM, one would need a 16GB GPU as the baseload is about 3GB's
One does not necessarily know that the scene is too heavy for one's GPU. The unfortunate trend in VRAM usage has been going up fast for the past two years and the reasons are increased number of high resolution textures and maps (which can be fixed), poor UV mapping (which can't be fixed) and unnecessarily high vertex count (difficult to fix).
The item that takes a scene from moderate to way too heavy can be for example a pair of boots or an earring, and of course hair.
Is there any way to see beforehand how much VRAM a scene uses so you know what parts of a scene are memory intensive?
No, and since nVidia removed the information from the log, it cannot be seen even during the rendering.
GPU-Z shows the total usage of RAM and VRAM.
Otherwise, there are some hints... If the installation file for a pair of boots is 700MB's while other boots can manage with 70MB's, the product is often less optimized.
One can look at the mesh in preview and compare the density to other meshes in the scene.
One can look at the pixel size of textures and maps and check the relative real world resolution... Does the square end of a match stick really need 100x100 pixels with similar size bump, normal, roughness and metallicity maps or is it overkill?
Just wanted to say thanks to everone for the help and info.
I have gone with a gigabyte NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060
I will bench mark my set up before and after the change over. we will see if the £330.00 was worth it?
If anyone knows of anything I should look out for or beware of, feel free to shout out
I think the 3060 is a very nice deal and a good step up for my 1050,
If you want to use two videocards for Daz can you just put in another 3060 and have 24gb of render memory?
That way I can spread the expenses a bit
and how would that compare to an 3080?
No, you'd have two 12GB cards sharing the load of the render. Memory pooling is only possible through NVLink, available on the 3090 and A4500 and up.
I would wager most users do not use a ton of VRAM. The larger a scene gets, the longer a scene tends to take rendering, simply because that probably means you have a lot more stuff in the scene. That said the 3060 is a great card for Iray because it has 12gb, so you have much more room to play with.
So if you CPU render now, I would bet money your scenes are not going to be larger than what a 3060 can handle, otherwise you probably would not be using a CPU to render at all, it would take literal days to render one image.
VRAM and RAM are releated, but not equally. Iray compresses texture data for VRAM, while the full uncompressed scene exists in RAM. This means the amount of RAM you use will always be higher than the amount of VRAM you use, often much higher. The RAM used can be 2, 3, even 4 times higher than the VRAM used. It tends to be between 3 and 4 on my machine. So you can kind of use this as a bit of a guide for what GPU fits you best. But everybody is different, and your scenes may end up being completely different in memory than others. Mesh data is NOT compressed in VRAM. This is why everybody is different. If your scene is all geometry, then Iray will not have anything to compress. But if you have lots of textures and low geometry, then the opposite is true.
As if that is not enough, you can adjust the compression, too. The setting is found in the advanced settings for Iray. It is a bit confusing, because it does not properly explain what it does at all. But by default Iray actually compresses a lot. Every texture with a vertical pixel count of 512 pixels is compressed a "medium" amount. While every texture with a vertical pixel count over 1024 pixels is more highly compressed. What does that actually mean??? If you look at most textures on products released in recent years, especially Genesis characters, you will find that most textures are well above both these thresholds. So the vast majority of textures used in Daz are compressed by Iray by default. You can increase the thresholds, this will reduce compression, but will also use more memory. Because the defaults are low, this why we often see such a wide gap between VRAM and RAM use with Iray.
A lot of times the compression is ok, but at higher resolution renders you may want to raise the thresholds. There are some textures that do not compress well in Iray. If you see some weird stuff like a straight line on a texture is bleeding into neighboring colors, this is often a sign the compression is too strong. Raising the limits will fix this easily, if you have the VRAM.
There are several ways to trim a scene to fit VRAM if needed, too. So you not instantly screwed if you exceed VRAM. But having a healthy amount of VRAM helps make it so that you do not have to do this so often.
Thank you for the answer, so as i understand it the scene will be loaded fully in both videocards and they will both do render passes.
and to take advantage of a dual 3060 setup the whole scene would still need to be under the 12gb limit or else it will fall back to CPU?
Thank you for the detailed answer,
For this scene I used 5000 passes and that took about 14-15 hours on CPU rendering, I put all models except the bike and the girl on base res.
there is a huge box with SSS settings around the whole scene to get the spotlights to scatter so that may use memory too.
I am curious to see how much ram this would use so ill start the render again tonight.
And I will probably get a 3060 in the near future and see if 5000 passes with GPU makes a difference in quality
Hi all
Thanks again for all the help and surgestions.
It was very helpful.
I installed the new card last night and changed the power supply. had to move 1 of the HD's.
I did run a quick bech mark and here is the result.
Old system:
my pc is
Gigabyte Z87X UD4H Motherboard this is PCIEX16
Chip is Intel i7-4770 @ 3.40GHz (8 core)
ram is 32GB
now running win 10 64pro
(was running win 7 pro until last week)
my cuurent graphics card is a Quadro K2000 But this is not interested is Rendering.
2X 2 TB.1X TB with the "C" drive on a SSD drive (under 1TB)
RENDER ON CPU ONLY
RENDER IMAGE: G8M, ATLAS Armored Suit for Genesis 8, with Tactical Assault Rifle freom Tactical Assault Rifle & Add-ons for Tactical Assault Outfit. plus a few bit.
RENDER TIME 9.16 mins
Power supply ATX-650W
NEW SETUP:
New card gigabyte Geforce RTX 3060
New power supply Hiper type M880W
RENDER ON CARD ONLY
RENDER IMAGE: G8M, ATLAS Armored Suit for Genesis 8, with Tactical Assault Rifle freom Tactical Assault Rifle & Add-ons for Tactical Assault Outfit. plus a few bit.
RENDER TIME 25 sec ( 25 f ing seconds. I had to run it a couple of times as I could not belive it )
So thanks again all
Sweet! And I am jealous of your 12GB or VRAM!
If you are new to Win10 and haven't already done so, I suggest rolling into your settings, select "privacy", and review each of the index item (not just "General") to make sure they match your preferences.
Happy Rendering!
I haven't followed this thread completely, but it seems as if most of the points have been made.
I just want to toss the following up for discussion again. I'm not sure why, but it's been rumored that the amount of computer RAM that you have is, for some reason, supposed to be three times the amount of VRAM on your graphics card. I.e. an RTX-3060 with 12GB of VRAM would need 3x12 or 36GB to fully take advantage of the 12GB of VRAM. I think the reason was something about pre-processing and having to uncompress texture files before feeding the graphics card. But admittedly, I do not remember exactly what was said the last time this was brought up.
To that end, taking advantage of a significant sale on RAM, I just upgraded my DAZing machine from 32GB to 64GB to make my RTX-3060 12GB graphics card happy. Not that I've noticed any difference, or if I even really needed to.
. But I like upgrading computers and spending money I can't afford, so that it won't burn a hole in my pocket. So, I guess my next step is to start making bigger scenes to see where the breaking point is. Wheee...
Thanks for the heads up. god it was almost like an open door
Some clarity on the subject from the program authors would be appreciated, graphic cards are not cheap, and it is a smack in the kisser to find I bought one that is not suitable based on general advice that it needed to be NVIDIA.
I will upgrade, but with a price tag upwards of £400 for a graphics card I cannot help but wonder if it is not better to just stick to buying the best CPU I can afford.
My new Home Built system, is a 12th gen i5 on an MSI Mortar B660M motherboard with 32 GB of DDR4 RAM, I replaced my old SSDs with the new M.2 drives expecting big improvements on my iRay renders, but apparently bringing over my 4GB Quatro 5800 was a waste of time, DAZ ignores it still. So should I move to an I9 CPU or spend the same money on a graphic card, only to find DAZ does not like that one either for some ill advertised reason.
At the end of the day it is a juggling act, I doubt anyone here - unless a professional artist - just uses their machine for DAZ images and those other programs would certainly reward me with doubling up my CPU cores rather than a highly specific GPU intended for gamers.
When Daz releases a new version of DS they update a thread about the version of Iray included in it, which includes requirements in terms of driver minimum version and other kind of requirements. Current thread is here: https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/600281/daz-studio-pro-4-21-1-x-nvidia-iray#latest
Regarding your card, AFAIK Quadro 5800 is a Tesla card, and those have not been supported by Iray for years (IIRC the last version of Iray supporting them was is 2017 or so). But even if they were, 4 GB VRAM is unlikely to be able to render most scenes, as a good part of the VRAM will already be taken by your OS and the base amount DS needs to render, leaving very little VRAM available for the actual scene data.
Nowadays the "not that expensive" card most often recommended for Iray rendering in recent versions of DS is the RTX 3060 12GB. It's not the latest generation but it has a good amount of VRAM and computing power, and support for 30x0 in Iray is unlikely to end in the coming years.
You really, really do not want to be CPU rendering with Iray. You can, but it should be a last resort. When it comes to Iray, even cheap low end GPUs are significantly faster than the fastest and most expensive CPUs in the world. An i9 is going to get beat by by even the worst GPUs you can buy today...and it will not even be remotely close. It is like trying to race an Olympic sprinter and you have your legs tied together. A modest GPU can be over 20 times faster than any desktop CPU. I cannot stress this enough how wide the performance gap is here. Do not buy a i9 thinking that is the best way to go.
Iray supports Nvidia GPUs for several generations after release. I believe the 900 series is still supported at this time, though they have official stated it is marked for depreciation, meaning support will end for it soon. The 900 series dates back to 2014, and here we are in 2023. You can pretty much expect to see a good 8+ years of support for Iray. Besides that, even if worse come to worse, you can simply choose to not update Daz Studio if the day comes that it ends support. You likely will not use a GPU that long, it will either break or become obsolete. However you really should get a more recent GPU, at least something from the 2000 series or newer. Starting with the 2000 series they added hardware ray tracing that is even faster, plus newer GPUs will still have more years of support ahead of them.
Iray supports desktop and Quadro (A series), and as I said, they are supported for a good 8 to 10 years.
The one limiting factor of GPUs is VRAM. You need a lot of it. If your scene is too large for your VRAM you will stuck in CPU only mode, you want to avoid that. So memory is just as important as speed. You do not need as much VRAM as RAM, so that's one positive. You said your PC has 32gb of RAM, so a 12gb GPU would suit you well. With that amount the odds are low that you would run out of VRAM before hitting the 32gb RAM. The 3060 is a decent budget option, and prices are dropping as we speak. There are new cards releasing now and in July that will push the 3060 to drop lower. There are other 12gb options, but the 3060 is going to be the cheapest. But I don't know what you make. Maybe you don't need 12gb. You could also pick from any number of 8gb cards, many of which are getting cheaper every day now. VRAM is a difficult spec to determine because all scenes are different. But since you only have 32gb of RAM, that spec tells me you do not have to go super wild with VRAM, because you don't have the RAM to really support getting too much. 8-12 is going to be your sweet spot. Could you use more at times? Maybe, but you can probably deal with it, optimize the scene to get it under you limit. But do not make a mistake and get too little VRAM for what you do. I would avoid anything less than 8, and I think 8 is pushing it. At any rate, I am pretty sure a 3060 is cheaper than a i9.
We have the benchmark thread. You can test this yourself and see how much a difference it can be. You can download the scene DUF found in the first post or two and render it. Then you'll have an idea of how much faster any particular GPU may be, thanks to all the user submissions. Some version of Daz Studio are different, so try to compare your result to people using the same version, at least the same version of Iray. Also, any performance differences are just a guideline, variances in how a scene is built can alter how one GPU performs against another by a small amount.
You'd be surprised how many hobbyist there are doing this. Daz is pretty much geared for the hobbyist user. The user base runs quite a spectrum, and you will find everything from people who use Daz as part of their professional work, people who use Daz as a side gig to their more normal job, and people who are just doing it for fun, and everything in between. There are a lot of people who play video games as a hobby, too, and Daz is pretty compatible with gaming. A good PC gaming rig is possibly a good Daz Studio rig, so you might find people who do both. Like me, I play games sometimes myself, and having a decent computer for that because I use Daz is double win in my book. I get a lot out of my PC whether it is for work or play.