Upgrade questions
michaelfenix
Posts: 23
I am currently using an i7 6700k with 16gb ram and a 4gb geforce gtx 960 to render. Lately my scenes are starting to crash daz. I'm trying to render the airport island city center set with 6 g8 characters at most. I know it's too much for my video card cause it immediately jumps to CPU rendering and takes hours to render. I'm looking at a 6gb rtx 2060 and perhaps a ram addition as well since daz is using all my available ram for these renders. My question is how much improvement would these upgrades bring? I don't want to spend almost $500 to save myself 10 minutes per render. If this isn't enough to show a decent improvement what would be for the scene I mentioned? Would 2x cards in sli mode handle it better? I want to perform this upgrade as cheap as possible as money is really tight right now so preferably below $700.
Post edited by michaelfenix on
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Comments
I doubt the 6GB card would cope either, at least without the use of Scene Optimiser and othe tricks to reduce the memory load.
With 6 G8 characters, I doubt whether Scene Optimiser would reduce the VRAM enough for a 6GB GPU. I use Scene Optimiser automatically these days and I have troubl getting more than 3 G8 characters to render on an 8GB GPU. I guess if they were in the distance so you could reduce the texture down from 4K to 0.5K you might have a chance - I've never tried at those low resolutions.
Yeah my 2070 struggles at around 4 G8 even with scene optimizer If I don't cut all the maps to 1/4th.
2nd hand 1070. (Yeah, I'm a broken reccord)
But even with 8gb 6 characters will take some optimising.
I wouldn't buy new now with new a new card generation eara in 4* months.
There will not be new cards in 4 months. The earlist reasonable annoucement of new cards is in late March at GTC. It will then take several months for the cards to actually get released. Traditionally the official announcement is more than 6 months prior to the cards launching.
Yeah...sadly 2 extra GB is not going to cut it. Even 8 is seriously pushing it. You would have to do a lot of optimizing. Anything not visible to the camera should have its textures removed. Like any surfaces hidden by clothing, ditch ALL of the textures for that surface. If their mouths are closed, ditch the mouth textures, and so on. If any of those people are in the distance, you should be able to get away with pulling out most of their textures (you don't need bump maps if they are far away) and you can probably compress what textures you keep by a lot. You might even be able to get away with them having no textures, just use a color. You can do this for clothing, too, and perhaps the airport. Any parts of the airport that you cannot see, kill them, or at least make them much simpler.
There is also one more option that may work. Prerendered billboards for the people away from the camera. You can render these people in similar light by themselves and save them as png. Then use a plain primitive and place this image on it and insert into the scene. If the angle is right and they are not too close to the camera, the effect can work. And since it is just a 2D image and not a full model, this will save a ton of memory. You can try to do this with as many people as possible and you might get it to fit.
BTW, even if the scene did fit VRAM, by optimizing it heavily before hand it will render a lot faster. And I mean a lot.
However, it is very possible that the airport all by itself will have trouble fitting into 4GB VRAM. I don't have that product, but it looks like a pretty resource heavy environment.
If you can do these things, then you have a chance with a 8GB card. I cannot recommend 6GB at all. The 2060 Super (make absolutely sure it is the SUPER version) has 8GB instead of just 6. This alone is reason enough to buy it over the regular 2060. But it is also faster, too, so its well worth the upgrade from the 2060. Going from the 2060 Super through to the 2080 Super will not net any more VRAM, just speed improvements. So in the scope of things the 2060 Super is a good buy. However I stress very much that you still need to optimize the scene to get it just to fit even that.
Like jmtbank said, we expect brand new GPUs from Nvidia this year. We do not know when, though. It might be Summer, but it might be the very end of the year, too. We only have rumors and speculation, but we expect big things (some rumors suggest we might see bumps in VRAM spec). I usually advise waiting if you possibly can, because in a few months that shiny 2060 Super may not be so hot. Plus with a new GPU release, the last generation cards should get much cheaper. But it is your choice, if you cannot wait, I can understand. There is a benchmark thread in my signature so you can compare the speed of many GPUs. Of course this only tests speed, not VRAM, and the test assumes the scene fits in VRAM. You can take this test for yourself, and compare your times to the cards listed, which would give you an idea of what to possibly expect from a new card. Going from a 970 to a 2060 Super would be quite a big jump for you. Considering the scale of the airport, it would probably be shaving quite a lot more than just 10 minutes off the render time over say, a 1070. The RT cores are a real game changer. That is why I cannot recommend anything before RTX. The ONLY card you might consider from before RTX would be the 1080ti, because the 1080ti packs 11GB of VRAM. Not many cards have 11GB, certainly not affordable ones.
What I saw someone do and I think it works is render the scene in 2 takes (or more). Once with some characters, once with others and the background they overlap.
As long as in each render you have all the overlapping parts you should be good. Afterwards you can combine the 2 renders in Photoshop or Gimp by overlapping the images.
I know I saw a tutorial on this somewhere and it looked fine at the end.
I used to do that all the time, more than 2 renders sometimes, even now with a 1080ti I sometimes have to render 2 images this one took 2, first had 14 G8's the rest were the second render
.