Best Nvidia card for Iray on a budget?
Aethyr
Posts: 117
Hey folks,
Render times with Iray are getting intolerable on just CPU, so I'm looking to pick up an Nvidia card. However, I'm not sure what specification I should be looking for -- I found this list of cards sorted by CUDA cores, but I know the amount of memory is also important.
I've been looking at the 1050 Ti -- though I'm not sure that's the best choice for Iray -- and have a budget of about £150. I'm not currently interested in PC gaming (at least, not the latest and greatest stuff that demands a high performance card) but I'd like to at least be able to run the games I have already. I'm running on a fairly mid-range system from a few years ago so I don't have anything too demanding.
I'm inclined to upgrade the entire system at some point (adding a new motherboard, new CPU, and more memory as well) but the priority is the graphics card. These days most of my computer use is for creative work (I also write music) and it's pretty frustrating that the only build guides I can seem to find focus on gaming.
Any and all help would be appreciated.
-A
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Comments
...optimal card would be a 6 GB 1060 with 1,280 cores (vs 768 for the 1050) which should support moderate sized scenes. However, you are probably looking at about £210 - £220. With the release of the 1080 Ti there is talk of prices for the standard 1080 and possibly 1070 coming down but not nearly enough to fit into your budget range.
I know the frustration and feeling. I'm on a fixed income with an old 1 GB GT 460, that is pretty much only sufficient for driving my displays, and feel totally hamstrung as I am pretty much stuck in the CPU slow lane for Iray rendering. As I tend to create "epic" scenes (in regards to polys and textures) nothing short of 1080 Ti with 11 GB would work for my needs.
In your price range is the 1050, as Kyoto Kid mentions. It's a newer gen Pascal-based card, so its CUDA cores are faster than previous generations. Even though it has "only" 768 cores, if you go by throughput it'll still be faster than the older cards. The 4GB version, which should be enough for an average set and two fully dressed Genesis 3 characters.
....just don't do so with a complex setting that has highly detailed textures (like a Stonemason set) or use HD as most likely you could end up rendering on the CPU as the scene will exceed the card's memory. If you can save up the extra 50 or so quid, the extra 2 GB and nearly double the core count, extra rendering and texture units the 1060 offers would be worth it especially as you start creating more involved scenes Remember that it's textures not polys which can easily push a render job over a card's memory limit. The higher the detail and resolution, the more memory that is required. Other factors like reflectivity and emissive lighting as well as running your display(s) and even the OS also add to that load (if you have an older card, use that to run the display(s) and the new one just for rendering).
When I built my system, GPU based rendering was pretty much only available on high end engineering workstations and even then, the best professional grade card of the day topped out at 6 GB (Fermi Quadro 6000) with a price tag of ten times that of the best consumer card available at the time (GTX 480 with 1.5 GB VRAM and 480 cores which retailed for around 500$). As all rendering in programmes like Daz Poser and Carrara was CPU based only, there was little point in purchasing a high end GPU card unless you were an avid gamer as well. Only since the introduction of Iray as an integrated component of the Daz programme has a more powerful, more expensive GPU card with more memory become a necessity to get render timed down to a more reasonable level.
Oh and when upgrading to a new more powerful GPU card, make sure your PSU can handle the load as during the render process, the card will be operating at peak power levels until the job is complete. I generally l use the manufacturer's suggested power requirement and add 50%. so if the specs call for a 500W PSU (which covers the card, CPU, cooling devices, and memory) a 750W unit will give more than enough overhead to avoid a meltdown.
have the prices of the older cards budged yet? it doesn't look like the 9xx series with 6GB DDR5 have dropped in price since the announced the 10xx let alone released and delivered them.
I'm using a 1050 Ti. It renders Iray fairly quickly although it can run out of memory with complex scenes. And it uses less power than my old 590.
There are ways to save memory; reducing the size of textures can help and there is a script somewhere; or you can resize them in Gimp, Photoshop and others.
Also worth considering is https://www.daz3d.com/n-g-s-anagenessis-2-revolution; it gets amazing results with just the diffuse textures. I customise the shaders, and often add a customised SSS, but without the memory use is much reduced and the benefit is no reduction in texture size.
If you can afford to save up and get the 1060, I would. Waiting may also have the benefit of allowing AMD's offering to force Nvidia to reduce prices (That depends on what they produce, and if it can compete with Nvidia on any level.); we can hope. It's why I am waiting. I use a 970 and a 980ti; I can say that 4GB was a frustrating amount of ram; great for small scenes; slow for large ones (slow because it wasn't used at all). I have issues with 6GB and I have to get creative, and that will always be the case (even with a titan or 1080ti) - but it is about comromise.
The obvious question is how much do you typically have in your scenes? As nicstt says, there are ways to reduce memory requirements but without some idea of what you need it is hard to say whether you would benefit from a 1050 or do better to soldier on for now until you can afford a higher-memory card.
SimTenero sells a script that can analyse a scene and estimate how much memory it needs.
I've seen a few state it isn't reliable.
Any script like this will never give an exact number, but on my tests so far it gives a number that is pretty close to what GPU-Z is telling me on the amount of memory used during rendering. The most important part of that script anyway is not the final number, but to give you some ideas of where the memory is going in order to better optimize it (ie reducing texture resolutions/removing unneeded or hidden additional maps etc).
there is a huge gap in term of iray perf between 1050 and 1060. i'd advice to do the financial effort to get the 1060. it is worth it
Good point.
...on a slightly different note (but still render related) I've noticed that older physical memory has been creeping up in price. Late last fall I saw a GSkill 24 GB DDR3 1333 tri channel kit for 114$ (not a sale price) at Newegg and wishlisted it as I need to upgrade my system's memory. Just a few moments ago I looked at my wishlist and that same exact kit is now priced at 187$.
...yeah the optimal card for my scenes would be a P5000 with 16 GB but need to have one of those Megabucks tickets with the winning numbers on it first.
I've had a great time rendering with my 4gb 1050ti, got the MSI on sale for $130. I plan to upgrade to the 1080ti in the fall, but if you're on a budget, the 1050ti has a lot of bang for your buck.
I will say that the texture reduction script in a must have at 4gb vram, but unless you're doing very close portraits you get no benefit using the 4k textures everyone is putting on their models.
Every render in my gallery was done on GPU, and while they may have been run overnight, that's partially due to my rendering at 4k and using a ton of emissive lights (and I like to let it render beyond 100%). I can run most of those scenes at 1080p in 10-15 minutes when I'm more conservative with the lighting.
EDIT: FYI, the "ti" model is the one to get if you're going to go with 1050 series, the original 1050 plays games well but Iray makes it cry like a baby, not to mention it's only got 2gb vram.
I had a 960 4GB that has been replaced under warranty with a newer 1050Ti. Did not try to render with Iray yet. Glad to thear the performance is good even if it has few cuda cores.
...a scene like this would choke a 1050 Ti or even a standard 1080: This is pretty representative of the scenes I create.
[Click on attachment below for full size.]
Rather than start a new thread on exactly the same subject, I thought I'd revive/resume/resurrect this one.
My present situation: I only got into 3D modeling/rendering very recently, and only as a hobby—and as a way of stretching my mind (what's left of it)—so I can't justify spending a ton of money on e.g. a dedicated rendering computer with umpty Titans and terabytes of RAM. Plus I'm retired, which gives me the time to indulge my enthusiasms but less money to do it with.
Right now I have an 8-core i7 with adequate cooling and an adequate power supply, but I'm running a pair of AMD cards which means the CPU is doing all the heavy work. So I'm seriously considering a switch from the AMD/ATI camp to the NVidia camp, simply to put the load on the GPUs rather than the CPU. I could possibly justify spending, say, $300 to $400 on a pair of 4GB 1050 GTs if I knew they would produce reasonably decent, reasonably fast Iray renders without choking on fairly large, fairly complex scenes.
Specifically, a pair of these: https://www.amazon.ca/Geforce-Phoenix-Graphics-PH-GTX1050TI-4G-Graphic/dp/B01M360WG6/ref=sr_1_10?ie=UTF8&qid=1492490505&sr=8-10&keywords=nvidia+gtx+1050 since the smaller form factor & the heavier-duty fan would seem to promise better airflow.
Any comments and suggestions would be most welcome. Thanks in advance.
..if your scenes are small yeah the 1050 Ti would be adequate. If you want to do "epic" scenes you might need a 1080 Ti.
Everything in my gallery (see sig) is rendered on a 1050ti.
That being said, if your budget is in the $300-$400 range I'd get a single 1070 or see if you can find a 1080(non-ti) on sale. Your'e only going to use the vram from one card, so having 2 4gb cards is still only going to be 4gb of scene memory (in reality, more like 3.2gb).
The 1050ti is a great budget card at $130 but the 4gb vram can be a challenge, I'd have gotten a 1070 8gb if I knew more about Iray when I got the computer, and plan to get the 11gb 1080ti this summer/fall.
Speed is great and all but it doesn't mean squat if you can't fit the scene on your card. :)
Thanks, kyoto kid and Brugan!
In my ignorance I assumed that 4Gb X 2 = 8Gb, so I'm glad I asked before pulling the trigger on a pair of 1050s.
Cheers, eh? ( as we're alleged to say in Canada
)
Yeh I wish it worked like that. Definitely go for the 8GB or higher card over 2x 4GB cards.
Oddly enough, I just posted in the IRay or 3Delight thread about that. My new machine has a GeForce GTX 1060, but it's the 3GB version, not the 6GB, so I'm not sure if it really has the oomph required for iRay; the CPU is an AMD FX8320 with 32GB RAM on Windows 10 Home.
Think I'll hold off buying TerraDome 3 for a while yet.
I've never owned an NVidia card & spent several futile hours yesterday Googling for an answer to my question. Really appreciate the input!
That image shouldn't come CLOSE to filling a 1080. Even rendered at 8k x 8k, the majority of the objects are less than 1/8th the width/height of the image. Even the few items in the foreground don't span the full resolution (even the closest figure only takes up about 2/3rds the height of the shot.....and so the pants/top only take up about 1/3rd, and the head of that figure only about 1/8th. Even with all the geometry, if you resized those maps in the midground/background to something that wasn't 4k x 4k or 2k x 2k (most in the midground would be just fine at 1k x 1k, those in the background could be 512x512 or less!), you'd find that scene would fit just fine in a 1070/1080, and maybe even a 980ti.....depending on the geometry density.
Resize the maps used on the figures other than the one in the foreground. Check if any of the maps being used on non-figures is bigger than 1k x 1k.....if so, resize them.
Personally, I wouldn't recommend anyone get a 4GB card; it's about budget, but like I say, I can't recommend it.
No, it seems that a 4Gb card simply won't do for the scenes I have in mind. When my budget allows, and when my larval 3D skills can (just barely) justify the investment, I'll be looking at 1080s with 8 or more gigs.
...the total memory load of the scene is 8.9 GB most due in part to the emnissives and particularly the volumetric mist effect.
Until I can change the resolution of textures directly in the Daz programme that ain't going to happen as doing so in a 2D programme is way too tedious and can easily result in my accidentally overwriting the original texture files (I have dyslexia and short term memory issues).
Two Texture Resizing Scripts https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/137161/reduce-texture-sizes-easily-with-this-script/
First, @Esemwy's is on the first page. Second, Mine is on page 3. BOTH do the resizing for you, you just select what you want to have the textures resized for, then run the script. Both rename the new resized files so the originals are still there. Mine also comes with it's own switching script, so you can just select which ones you want to swap around, and then that script can automatically swap the resolutions.
Is that 8.9GB of memory needed to load into DS, or 8.9GB of VRAM? The two figures will be very different, as DS uses far more memory to load and render a scene compared to the amount of VRAM required to render the scene with a GPU.