Nvidia GPU shopping tips for large scene Iray rendering.
JamesJAB
Posts: 1,766
Something interesting has happened involving Nvidia GPUs because of how high Nvidia set the pricing scale for the new Geforce RTX cards.
The price range for a new 11GB RTX 2080 ti is from about $1100 - $1400 depending on who makes it, the cooling setup, and overclock setings.
The price range for a used 16GB Quadro P5000 is around $1250 used and $1400 new on ebay.
You can get the Professional version of the GTX 1080 with 5GB more VRAM than the RTX 2080 ti for about the same price. I don't know about you, but I would jump on the extra VRAM in a heartbeat. That will give you a bunch of extra headroom to turn on Speed vs Memory instancing and Optix prime on scenes that struggle to fit into 11GB of VRAM. Or it would just be 5GB more for creating larger more complex scenes.
On a side note, you can also get a used 24GB Quadro M6000 (Pro version of the Maxwell based Geforce GTX Titan X) for around $1150 on ebay. Shure it will render quite a bit slower than the RTX 2080 ti, but it has more than double the VRAM...
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I use 2 titan x's with 12gb of vram and that is enough for my uses. If you have to do a large scene>> do the background in 3delight and the central charaters in Iray and composite in Photoshop or Gimp. I have stopped fighting the vram short comings of Iray in Daz Studio. I just composite. Oh I also use Mcasuals despecle script so I only render for a short while and remove the fireflies and I'm ready to go. It is just my opinion, but I think that new technology that has just come out is way over priced and a waste of money. Just wait and get it 2nd or 3rd gen card that fits your needs and don't get ripped off.
This thread is just pointing out ways of getting more VRAM for the same price as the current top end "comsumer" card.
If I have time I will keep this thread updated with price ranges for high VRAM (16GB and up) cards on ebay.
That would be very usefull.
It's frustrating how what is probably the best option these days, the RTX Titan, is often more than $2.5k. Those cheap P-6000s look tempting, but of course they are a bit slower. But if one can actually find a P6000 for less than $1400, well that's something.
Ebay makes me nervous though...
...the downside with ebay is everyone there pretty much uses PayPal and I cancelled my PP account years ago when I kept having issues with them.
I thought eBay was pretty much dead. Is it still going?
Ebay is very buyer friendly./ As long as you test/examine your purchase immediately upon receiving you really cannot havea problem. If you receive broken product or are defrauded you can simply demand a refund and if the seller refuses PP and Ebay will do it for them.
Ebay checkout lets you do credit cards now. (in fact paypal isn't even the default selection anymore)
Here you go... My price findings as of yesterday afternoon.
The first section is for your double slot cards, and the second section is for single slot cards.
...currently running a Maxwell Titan-X. That price on the M6000 seems very tempting as long as Nvidia doesn't abandon it for use with Iray.
Well, that will be years off, since they just finaly ended Iray support for Fermi (GTX 4XX and GTX 5XX)
They will end support for Kepler next (GTX 6XX and GTX 7XX), even so, it will still probably be a few years after that for Daz Studio to catch up with that version of Iray.
There is also the posibility that Iray will never lose Kepler support, because that's the first Nvidia unified architecture chip that does not have a "hot shader clock"
Updated used prices. A few prices went down a few went up.
Edited to add Tesla cards 16GB and up.
Just pointing this out... look at the Tesla T4. It is a 16GB low profile single slot card that only uses 70W.
...but aren't Tesla cards primarily for deep learning, not graphics rendering?
It's my understanding that tesla cards are just Quadro cards with no video output hardware.
According to an old 3DStudioMax digital flyer, they where bragging about the Iray redering performance boost from mixing Quadro and Tesla cards in the same sysrem.
...so you still need an expensive Quadro to make use of a Tesla and then that is just for added core count to speed the process up. Still a costly venture just for improved rendering speed.
Considering that Geforce and Quadro cards can co-exist in a single system without issues, the same should hold true with Geforce and Tesla cards in the same system.
Updated used prices for 17July2019
...however, AMD is useless for Iray or Octane so no point in wishing.
As to using a Tesla card with say a Titan-X, if the paired with a Tesla M40, will Iray defer to that as the primary rendering card?
I wouldn't count on it working at all. If it did you should be able to set which one is the primary render card.
It is important to know that Tesla's are not intended for consumer grade motherboards. I strongly doubt you could get one up and running on a board if it wasn't in a x16 slot. Based on the experience of someone trying to get 2 working that won't work at all on consumer motherboards. So be cautious about picking up cheap Tesla's on Ebay for DS.
If you are referring to the impact of AMD on nVidia prices that is irrelevant, it isn't sales to iray users that determine the price of the nVidia cards. If the AMD can compete in games then it may well lead to lower prices on the consumer-oriented nVidia cards, which would benefit us as a side-effect.
Yes that may be true, but...
If you look at the used market on ebay, you can get a well equipped dual CPU (No GPU or HDD) Dell Precision T7600 that have 4 full PCI-e 16x slots and a 1300W PSU starting under $350 after shipping.
These are dual processor workstations that use the Xeon E5 CPUs. The E5 line of Xeons come with 40 PCI-e lanes. Dell set this motherboard up to use the PCI-e lanes from both CPUs
CPU1 : PCI-e 3.0 16x, PCI-e 3.0 16x, PCI-e 3.0 4x (full length)
CPU2 : PCI-e 3.0 16x, PCI-e 3.0 16x
Chipset : PCI-e 2.0 4x (full length)
And BTW: The cooling setup on the T7600 / T7610 is amazing. It's quiet even when rendering with both of my GPUs running full blast.
Those things are 7 years old, at least. I run a datacenter, there's a reason we always replace hardware before then. They may run fine or things could start going bad.
Do you mean quiet in that you can't hear the fans or quiet, the fans aren't running? Those old rigs may only have Molex fans not PWM ones and that means the fans should always be running pretty high.
Quiet as in whisper quiet. The front of the tower has 3 large diameter fans that pull air in the front and push it through the system and out the back, and the chasis is solid enough to absorb most of the GPU fan noise. (The fans never turn off, but they push a large volume of air without being noisy) Even at full hrottle with 2 GPUs and both CPUs renering it is still quieter than the Air Conditioning in my house.
Here's what the front fan setup looks like. (image taken from the Dell Precision T7610 service manual)
Also the way the tower is designed, the HDDs do not get in the way of the airflow, as they are in a seperate front accessable bay on the back side of the motherboard along with the 1300W toolless removable server PSU at the back of the system.
Those look like 80 or 92mm. That's on the small size. But a workstation running those crappy E5's and not packed to the gills with PCIE cards should still have enough airflow.
I got curious and looked into that PSU, never seen a workstation with a server PSU and it sounded like you were describing one. But of course its Dell. That thing looks proprietary, It looks based on a a pair of 1U's side by side. If it goes bad good luck replacing it.
Any card that has lots of RAM on the card, imo a Titan as a minimum.
... But you will pay for said RAM.
Alternatively, if you can wait, do so (my preferred option); it is possible that you may be able to share RAM when 4.12 goes into Beta. No I don't know if it is being implemented, it is merely a possibility.
Alternative, don't use Iray, or at least Studio, to render; other render engines may implement RAM sharing.
Another alternative, render in Cycles (Blender) on AMD cards; they support more RAM for less cash. Here you have the alternative of using AMD or Nvidia cards for cycles.
Is it still a royal pain in the ass and need a boatload of shader tweaking to get daz figures into blender? Last time I tried I noped out after a week of banging my head on the keyboard lol.
You got one of those for 350 on ebay? Cheapest I see on canadian ebay is CDN$1,210.51 :(
It could work with one card even on consumer MB. The problem the guy had in the other thread was to boot with two cards
There may need a bit of fiddling but one card may be worth a try at this price if VRAM is more important
It it advised to use a same generation Quadro for display to get access to features like Maximus but it is not required. Going with a cheap Quadro can work too
Mixing with a consumer card may be difficult.
That's what I was thinking. If NVlink VRAM Pooling comes to DS, a dual RTX 2070 Super + NVlink would cost around 1000$ and may give more bang for the bucks
...as I understand RTX 2070s are not NVLInk compatible, only RTX 2080 and on up.