Lots of exciting hardware coming very soon - Building a beastly Daz Studio machine
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Maybe beastly, maybe just OK depending on how awesome of a rig you have. 
Lots of exciting changes for PCs coming:
ATI Vega is coming out next week, hopefully it will push Nvidia card pricing down in the near future.
Intel's new Core-X CPUs and X-299 boards also come out next week. Then there's AMD's answer to the mega-core Core-X with Threadripper later this year.
I'm thinking a box with at least 6-8 cores. i7-7800 with 6 cores at $389, i7-7820 with 8 cores at $599, (28 PCI lanes each) to possibly i9-7900 with 10 cores at $999 and 44 lanes.
Does Daz Studio benefit from having many more cores? Recent recommendation 6 cores.
https://helpdaz.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/207530513-System-Recommendations-for-DAZ-Studio-4-
Dollar for dollar, the Intel chips win on performance when there are less threads (workstation and gaming benchmarks).
As for graphics, I'm trying to determine if the 11 GB of the 1080 Ti is enough. If so, 3 or 4 of those. If not, 2 Titan Xp. That will impact the board & CPU decision with PCI lanes.
Edit: Forgot to mention I only use Iray with Studio.
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Crypto-currency miners will be happy :)
If you're using 3delight renderer the answer is yes. iRay is also multithreaded but the main bottleneck here is GPU so no need in 8 cores at all. DAZ Studio itself is not too dependent on number of cores.
No amount of VRAM is 'enough' :)
If you only use Daz and iRay for your art, then spend your first money on GPU. If you do professional animation, you better consider your cores next because your GPU memory is not enough. (Unless you have enough money for a top of the line Quadro). If you only do still photos as a hobby, I don't know why you would want more than 4 cores. If I were a professional iRay animator, I would buy a Quadro P6000 and then another one when I could afford it. But alas, us poor hobbyists must make do with the GTX1080ti.
Good points drzap. I'm a hobbyist/semi-professional, doing still image pinups and comics but that's not my day job.
Current machine is a 4-core i7-6700k with 48 GB of RAM, SSD drive and two Titan X Pascal. No complaints about preview window speed, that's good.
Biggest thing effecting my workflow is the amount of time it takes to see the render start. It typically takes about 2-3 minutes at 4K on pretty complex scenes before it starts to render. Like 3-4 Genesis 3 figures, and nVidia Inspector typically reports 8-10 GB used.
If you keep the first render open, it will greatly reduce the time of the following ones (at least until you add more stuff to the scene or make changes, haven't tested exactly how that affects the start time, but if the scene content hasn't changed when you do the next render it will definitely speed up things to keep the previous one open). And it doesn't seem to require much more memory to keep previous renders open.
You do not need new computer. What you have is pretty adequate for the job. You need to optimize your use of textures. If you're doing 4k image and have character fully visible from head to toes you can safely use 2k textures for it without any loss in quality. For far away things and out of focus things texture resolution may be reduced even more. Shink your texture use to 1Gb and you'll see 10-fold improvement in renderer startup time :)
Good idea, but I do a mix of both full-figure and then torso up shots. I'd have to resize all the images, make new materials to the reduced size, and it would add to the size of my library.
I don't really need a new computer, but I want one. I have 2 systems for rendering, the second could use a boost.
Worth it to some people for sure, but to me it doesn't seem worth all the effort to save maybe $500 on hardware over a few years.
If you use Daz Studio dynamic cloth, more threads is better. The Optitex engine will max out all 16 threads on my dual quad core Xeon rig.
HDD space is cheap compared to your time and electricity costs. If you're making stories with the stable set of characters then making required reduced textures and materials will take half an hour per character but after that it will save your time continuosly.
That's another question :)
As I know, I will use DAZ Studio and Iray only, I will only go for Intel and Nvidea. Is there anything more? I don't care. ;-)
I agree about Nvidia, bot not about Intel.
My next build is either going to be Epyc or Threadripper.
My signature may look like Im Intel loyal, but in reality my desktop started as an extremely cheap ebay find, and for notebooks you are kinda stuck with intel if you want a Nvidia GPU.
And on a side note... Even if you are pure Intel and hate AMD... AMD coming out with extremely competitive CPUs that meet or beat Intel at every price point will ultimately benifit the comsumer. This will force Intel to bring out faster better CPUs at lower prices as soon as AMD starts chipping away at their market share.
Ever since the AMD FX chips came out with underwelming performance numbers, Intel has just been in cruise mode and had no reason to make large performance jumps from generation to generation. (Not talking about the old Athlon 64 based FX CPUs)
Nvidia Inspector?
Will this program give me stats on my renders? I need it! Where?
If you just want a new computer, definitely wait for the Epyc (my god, up to 32 cores in one cpu). I have a dual Xeon setup with 28 cores on my rendering machine and I plan to do GPU rendering in iRay and CPU rendering in Clarisse at the same time. And in the winter I will sleep in my studio for the heat
.
Haven't noticed that, thanks. Got into the habit of always closing, earlier 4.9x versions of Studio very often had problems of running out of VRAM and dropping to CPU, forcing me to close and re-open DS. I'll have to try that.
Perhaps I'll try it with a character. SSDs still aren't cheap (in fact, have gone up in price since my last SSD upgrade). My library is already filling up my main SSD, had to purge some stuff recently. I don't know if I do enough full figure shots to make the purchase of additional SSD worth it. I could throw it off to a spindle drive, but that seems like a wash or step back from a performance standpoint.
Well, it all depends on usage... As far as heavy use, mine is rendering with Iray with DS and gaming. If DS isn't going to use a ton of cores, the gaming doesn't, it won't do anything for me. Main reason to possibly go to the big i9 is to get the 44 PCI lanes with 3 or 4 video cards.
Nvidia Inspector I got from Guru 3D. I don't overclock with it, just use the monitoring.
http://www.guru3d.com/files-details/nvidia-profile-inspector-download.html
ooooh, I have GPU-Z and it shows me memory usage. I didn't think of that before. Now if daz could just show me render times in a log, I could have some useful information to evaluate this software with.
Render times are shown in the main log.
I'm sorry, can you tell me where Daz stores the main log? I can't find any reference to it.
When inside DS
Help>Troubleshooting>View Log File
Well, it all depends on usage... As far as heavy use, mine is rendering with Iray with DS and gaming. If DS isn't going to use a ton of cores, the gaming doesn't, it won't do anything for me. Main reason to possibly go to the big i9 is to get the 44 PCI lanes with 3 or 4 video cards.
Nvidia Inspector I got from Guru 3D. I don't overclock with it, just use the monitoring.
http://www.guru3d.com/files-details/nvidia-profile-inspector-download.html
Tried it & noted the memory usage. It does use significantly more, but appears to be less than twice the memory of the render.
A scene with 3 Genesis 3 figures, nVidia Inspector reported using 9,000 MB VRAM for the first render. Kept open, started another and it did seem to start faster. Reported use was 11,000 MB VRAM during the second render.
OK, I've only tested it with smaller scenes so far, here I usually see start times reduced to 1/4 or less while memory use increasing with only 10-15%. Maybe the changes with larger scenes, or depends on the content (lots of polys versus huge textures).
I ordered a pair of of 1080 Ti Hydros for now.
I can get my feet wet with watercooling in the AIO setup, and it will be interesting to compare them vs. my air cooled Titan X Pascals. I could use the additional rendering power now, but it will still be a while to see what happens with the Threadripper processors. The 64 PCIe lanes sounds interesting over Core X's 44.
Many of the performance tests that knocked the FX series were centered on single threaded uses, which Intel admittedly pretty much dominated, like gaming. However, with the advent of Ryzen and more multithreaded applications, some of the later FX cpus have been subject to retesting and they're actually performing quite well in multithreaded tests against the I5 and even some I7 family members. I suspect that the later FX series were far better then many of us realized, and that it may have been partly a matter of the programs not being optimized for that cpu. Ryzen ran into the same issue upon initial release, with a lot of folks decrying the performance versus what was claimed. As soon as programs and tests were more mutltithreaded specific a few weeks later, plus that RAM bug getting ironed out, the performance numbers went way up. I'm certainly not claiming that the FX series was altogether better than the I7 series, Heavens no, and I'm an AMD fanboy, merely that the they werent' and aren't as poor as a lot of bad press would have us believe.