Recent Upgrade - am I Daz Studio ready

Amy_Bone

I gave up on DS a while back because rendering was taking far too long and the results weren't great,  I had to concede a lot of this was probably down to the age of my rig. I had an AMD Phenom II Quad Core x 4 955 Processor with 16gb RAM and an Nvidia GTX970Ti .

I have recently bought an AMD Ryzen 3 2200G on an A320K Motherboard with 8gb of 3000MHz DDR4 RAM (I'll be doubling this as soon as I can afford it). 

I'm still using the 970Ti as I can't afford to go to a 1070 yet, so I can't do owt about that right now.  The benchmarks I've seen for 1050 suggest's no appreciable inprovement in performance over the 970 so I don't want to waste money I don't have on one.

My question is, will this rig give me the juice to deal with DS/Iray with reasonable (less than 2 hours) render time and quality?

AJ2112

Computer power is always a plus, but not necessary.  Scene render times, truly depends on how scene is set up, lighting, resources, etc....  Also depends on how large resolution setting is.  It's mainly what an artist desires to achieve.  I've had renders from less then a minute to a few hours.  970 is an outstanding video card, which was my previous prior to 1080,.  I noticed the same, with benchmarks.  What I did notice was 1080 over 970 improvement in Iray preview window, alot faster rotating, refreshing, etc.....  As for final render speeds, didn't really notice much difference.  Just my opinion.  Have fun with new comp     

jmtbank

The processor speed will make it nicer working in the editor on characters and small scenes.

Rendering times will have the setup phase (before you see the first pixels appear) reduced because of the processor upgrade. This might reduce times by up to a couple of minutes on large scenes.  If you do lots of qucik test renders before the main render this can add up.  But overall because the 970 / 980Ti isn't being changed, Your main render times won't see much difference. 

 

Dropping to 8G system memory may make larger scenes impossible to load/work with even if you did want to render on CPU.

If your card is the 6Gb 980ti, the drop to 8Gb system memory may result in some hangs and Daz crashing filling up all 6gb sometimes.

 

Further things to check/decide :  Will the motherboard get an update for the 3000 series ryzen processors due out in 4 months?  Does it definitely have 4 slots so that you can upgrade to 16gb later - so shop bought PCs might only come with 2 slots.  Will you be OK with selling your current memory if you want to upgrade to 32gb next year?

Amy_Bone

Thanks for the feedback it's very helpful.

Hopefully I'll have the RAM upgrade in place in a week or two at most.  My board only has 2 slots but I have a single 8gb stick so the capacity is there.  If I can ever afford a brace of 16gb sticks I'll be happy to sell the old Ram on or bequeath it to somebody. 

I did check future expansion options but to be honest I'll be happy if the 3000 series makes the 2000 series Ryzen 7 drop to a relatively affordable price.  Or that I'll win the lottery and buy a Threadripper!

I'll probably upgrade my graphics card first though.  The data-mining bubble seems to have finally burst so Graphics Cards prices should correct over the next few months.