Looking for advice on what type of computer works best with DazStudio4
galactica1981
Posts: 1,251
I've got a computer that is over 5 years old, and I am thinking of getting a new one. I find that when I create 3D art that has a lot of pieces to it, Daz4 really slows down. Saving a large file takes 5 minutes, and when I try to render anything the software crashes. 3Delight was recommended to me, but I'm not too crazy about it.
Anyway, does anyone know what kind of computer would work best with Daz4? Thanks.
John
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Comments
It all depends on personal preference and how much money you are willing to spend. Can you give us a estimate of what you are looking to spend? Most off the shelf computers will work fine as long as you have at least 2GB of RAM and a decent graphics card. Most prebuilt systems come with 4-8GB of RAM now and ATI graphics cards.
I'm willing to spend up to $800. I've seen one with 8GB of RAM for $500 and a 10GB of RAM for $800. Is there a big difference between the two in terms of speed?
The RAM would have very little to do with the speed in most circumstances, and $300 seems a lot to spend for an extra 2 GB RAM.
There is probably a bit more to it than just extra RAM on the $800 one I think The speed of the CPU would be more important, and is measured in GHz.
Not a Mac ;) lol
Not meaning to argue with anyone that knows what they are talking about (because I don't), but when I increased from 4 to 8 gig ram my rendering for animation seemed to speed up quite a bit (as did the overall performance of my system). I also understand you can render MORE objects in a scene with more memory, and since the upgrade I have not had ANY render errors, so I am guessing the more memory the better... for what it's worth...
Yeah more ram is good especially if you are talking less than 8 gigs. But from 8gigs to 10gigs its not that big of a deal.
I can say that for the budget minded if you aren't doing truly complex scenes a midrange computer these days for the prices you mentioned should handle you well. You will just need to be realistic about what it can and can't do.
You will still want to learn how to optimize render times. Just because you upgrade your pc doesn't mean that you can ignore how things like transparencies, raytracing etc impact your render times. Turning off ray-tracing on hair in one of my renders took the render time down to 5 minutes from originally around an hour.
Make sure it has a video card that isn't intel.
It really depends on what you plan to use but for 500-800 you can get something decent enough to begin with
I guess you're going to buy a PC and not a Mac but it should be quite the same but the price and OS
1 - Get a Quadcore either AMD phenom II or Intel (i5 or i7). Intel is more expensive but you get more CPU power for the prize. I have a phenom and I'm quite happy with it but intel is a better choice if you can afford it
2 - If you're going Windows, get the 64 bit version so that the OS can use more than 4Go
3 -3D Apps are memory hungry. So 8Go is the least that you should buy. Take care of the fact that you should have 4 Slots for memory and it's better to get 2x4Go and have 2 free slots so that if you later need 16 Go you can expand your memory without to trash the old ones. You could also buy 16 Go and have space to go to 32 Go depending on what you buy. Ask the vendor. I have 16 Go and I often eat them but that's because I often open 2 DAZ Studio, 1 Photoshop, 1 Firefox with loads of opened tabs and eventually blender and sculptris at the same time. That really depends on how you work and the size of your scene
4 - Any recent graphic card should be OK if you don't use it to render. I'm not sure but even the integrated ones should be OK as they should be better than my old X800XL which is more than 5 years old and only has 256 MB memory and I'm OK. If you plan to use Luxrender or Octane to render you must choose a decent graphic card with 3Go Ram (it's an advice) because the scene with textures will have to fit the Graphic card's memory to render. So in this case the more the better. If you want to use Octane buy an Nvidia. Otherwise it's up to your taste or liking and budget
The more ram, the better, the less you have to rely on virtual memory, the better it will be for your disk. It does sound like your looking more for a PC than a Mac. I had great results on Windows 7 and it would allow you to utilize Bryce and Cararra without much trouble. Just up the ram when you get the chance.
I'm currently on a Mac LION, so don't have access to Bryce and Hex doesn't always co-operate, but the apps I need for school work best on Mac.