Building a PC

jenniferhughey

Hi-I read some of the posts that this issue was discussed earlier in the year but since technology changes so much..is this still a good article for builds? It was written in December.
https://www.logicalincrements.com/articles/building-pc-3d-rendering-animation
Also, does Ram or processor matter much in terms of rendering, or is most of the load on the graphics cards? If it is the graphics card, then having 2 working together would be better than one powerful one?
My husband already built the machine I have but it just seems to take forever to render so I want to try to maximize our dollars but still get a system where I can multi task while rendering. I have an i5 and a GTX 960 with I believe 16 meg of RAM. Processor can't be upgraded very far because of the Motherboard so a motherboard upgrade will have to happen before doing the rest..
He's wondering due to everything that will need to be upgraded, that maybe just buying an Alienware might be the ticket? Saves him from the time..
Any insights will be greatly appreciated..

Richard Haseltine

Try to work out how much memory you need in the GPUs - a powerful GPU, or GPU-combo, that won't hold your work will drop back to CPU (at which point its speed matters abd the GPUs are irrelevant)

kenshaw011267

None of those builds were then or are now good for 3d rendering at the prices listed.

On upgrading what you have vs. building/buying new. There isn't any reason that the i5 won't work. The bottleneck is the GTX 960. That card is both very small in terms of VRAM, which determines what scenes can fit on it, and has very little CUDA, which determines rendering speed. What I'd do is determine your budget for the upgrade and look at Nvidia graphics cards in that price range.  Once you pick one your husband should verify that the power supply in your existing PC can support it. If it can't you'll need to either drop down until you get a card that your power supply can handle of spend some of your budget on a new power supply adjusting your graphic card choice if needed. If the card has more the 8Gb of VRAM then you might also want to look at adding some more system RAM but that is the lowest priority.

 

jenniferhughey

Richard Haseltine said:

Try to work out how much memory you need in the GPUs - a powerful GPU, or GPU-combo, that won't hold your work will drop back to CPU (at which point its speed matters abd the GPUs are irrelevant)

Is there a way to figure this out? I'm lost at all the graphics card stuff..

jenniferhughey

kenshaw011267 said:

None of those builds were then or are now good for 3d rendering at the prices listed.

On upgrading what you have vs. building/buying new. There isn't any reason that the i5 won't work. The bottleneck is the GTX 960. That card is both very small in terms of VRAM, which determines what scenes can fit on it, and has very little CUDA, which determines rendering speed. What I'd do is determine your budget for the upgrade and look at Nvidia graphics cards in that price range.  Once you pick one your husband should verify that the power supply in your existing PC can support it. If it can't you'll need to either drop down until you get a card that your power supply can handle of spend some of your budget on a new power supply adjusting your graphic card choice if needed. If the card has more the 8Gb of VRAM then you might also want to look at adding some more system RAM but that is the lowest priority.

 

Ah, good to know! Searching the forums, that was the most current reccommendation. Thanks for explaining, I'll pass it on!

kenshaw011267

jenniferhughey said:

Richard Haseltine said:

Try to work out how much memory you need in the GPUs - a powerful GPU, or GPU-combo, that won't hold your work will drop back to CPU (at which point its speed matters abd the GPUs are irrelevant)

Is there a way to figure this out? I'm lost at all the graphics card stuff..

Go into the advanced tab of the render settings pane and uncheck CPU in which ever mode, photorealistic or interactive, that you use. Then load an average scene and start rendering it. Once the render is actually started, the preview image building up, open task manager and see if the CPU is being used effectively 100%. If it is the GPU couldn't handle the scene and iRay dropped to CPU. That will give you a baseline to work from.

JamesJAB

Right now your issue is that Geforce GTX 960.  Best case you have the 4GB version and the GPU will handle smaller scenes with 1 or 2 characters depending on complexity and materials.  Worst case you have the 2GB version of the GTX 960, which will handle 1 clothed Genesis 8 character at most.

If you have a budget that can handle it, I suggest upgrading to a Nvidia Geforce GPU with at least 8GB of VRAM (GTX 1070, GTX 1070ti, GTX 1080, GTX 1080ti, RTX 2070, RTX 2080, RTX 2080ti)

One more thing to check.  The current release of Daz Studio moved to a newer version of Iray.  You will need to make sure that you are running a recent GPU driver version (418.xx or newer if I remember correctly)

rrward

Right now the biggest bang for your buck is a video card upgrade. JamesJAB's list of cards is pretty good. One thing you'll also want to look at is your power supply. The 960 only needs 120 watts, while anything worth buying today is going to need twice that. So you'll want at least a 600 watt PSU, but I would strongly reccomend an 800 watt unit. If you are still running a spinning hard drive an upgrade to a SSD will make everything more responsive.

One more thing to look at is the width of the video card. The 960 is a two slot card, which was the standard for a long time. Some of the newer cards are 2.5 and 2.75 slot monsters and may not fit if your case is tight for space or you have other cards already installed.

jenniferhughey

Thanks so much everyone, passing it on! Can't wait for an upgrade!!