GEForce MX150 for DAZ STUDIO?
odastein
Posts: 606
My computer has serious problems, and I'm considering buying temporarily an used one for cheap. It's equiped with a GeForce MX150 . Will it work for Iray?
Apparently, it would have 4 Go of VRAM but I'm not sure if that is all usable by DAZ...
Post edited by Chohole on
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It does have CUDA so it should work. It is a cut down 1030 which is the worst card from Pascal so don't expect much.
I thought that only the VRAM really mattered? What kind of difference should I expect by comparison with a better card that would have as much VRAM?
(I think my current card had only 2GO VRAM. I can't verify because I don't remember the model and among other things my computer doesn't recognize the video card anymore.
Speed. Also older (pre-RTX) cards now have a memory overhead compared to RTX cards as Iray passes them additional code to make up for the lack of built-in RTX features.
So, less than 4 Go of VRAM would be available for DAZ, if I understand correctly? And it could be slower even if the scene fit in the memory?
(On the other hand, my previous card wasn't exactly top notch, either)
Not only. VRAM is of course important, as if your scene doesn't fit in the available VRAM DS won't use your card at all.
But the number of RTX and CUDA cores is important to determine what features it can use and how quick it will compute things.
CUDA is what does the actual number crunching involved in doing the render, and there is an awful lot of it which is why it takes so long. So more and newer CUDA is better. Generally more CUDA goes hand in hand with more VRAM so it isn't discussed as much but there are times like this where if the option is available getting a 4Gb card from the previous generation might be better because it would have so much more CUDA.
You meant a 4Gb card from the more recent generation, no?
Either way. Pretty sure you'd get more CUDA from Maxwell than Turing at that level. 896 or 1250 for the 1650 or 1650 Super (which are cards pretty much everyone says not to buy) vs. 2048 in the 980 which was a very good card. the 1030 has 384. Now I do studiously pay no attention to gaming laptops so I have no idea what the market is like for used laptops with 980's or if any even exist but if I was choosing between cards with 4Gb to render in iRay I'd go for the 980 over those cards.
With used stuff, it's difficult to find very specific things. Pretty often, the graphic card is poor except for gaming computers, but those sell at a premium. Commonly, the graphic card model isn't even mentioned, which make looking for a computer quite tedious.
I saw a GTX 1060, but it was almost twice the price (and sold as a "gaming computer").
One thing to keep in mind from the DS 4.12 release notes thread(April of this year):
The "small" Maxwell GPUs they're talking about is mostly the 700 series and the mobile 900s, so while they may work right now, there's no telling how long that will be the case. If Kepler is being dropped in the next release, the Maxwell line probably has about 2 more years or so.
The Pascal GPU "should" be supported for another 2 years after Maxwell support is dropped, so I'd recommend that.
Here's a table of GPUs by compute capability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUDA#GPUs_supported.
Edit: obviously, there's no way to know when Nvidia's going to drop support for GPU's, but keep in mind that the Fermi cards were dropped about two years ago, Kepler is being dropped right now, so I'm just going off that info.
That's interesting to know, thank you.
I assume that "Maxwell generation" GPUs are those called "MX", such as the one I was asking about. Is that correct?
no Maxwell would be the 700 and 900 series GPU's. I think it is safe to assume the ones in danger of being pulled are the 700's. The 900's are simply not that old and that would affect a lot of people and they have generally waited a good while before ending support.
MX is the designator for mobile (laptop) gpus.
It's in the wikipedia table that I linked. You have to scroll down a bit, but it lists each card by compute capability version.
Well, thanks, especially since I hadn't realized that the computer I was thinking about buying was a laptop.
Sorry I had assumed you knew it was a laptop. Why aren't you just buying a used GPU?
If you system is really badly screwed up it may work to buy used but the one part you are probably best avoiding is a used GPU. Getting a refurbished bussiness computer for something between $100 and $200 can get someone a system that runs and will let you even run Daz, iRay renders will be painful (but 3Delight renders shouldn't be that awful). Then you can save up for a new GPU rather than trying to limp along on a real bottom of the barrel system that you paid $400 or more for for a lot longer.
Since the GPU is often not mentioned or mentioned only in the detailled informations making browsing through pages and pages of computers on offer tedious, I called shops and such instead, asking them if they had a refurbished/used computer with a Nvidia card, etc...So, I didn't see the computers proposed. In this case, I thought for some reason that it was a desktop.
I'm not buying an used GPU because my computer is indeed badly screwed (and I didn't even know that you could replace the GPU on a laptop, in fact). It doesn't recognize my current GPU, for one, so it might not recognize another, either.
You're good at price guessing because it's indeed € 450.
I'm not really sure what I'm going to do at the moment. I can even keep on with my current computer, in fact since it's running again. Also the one I'm envisioning, despite being bottom of the barrel from your point of view, would probably be an improvment on what I was currently using (more video RAM and also more regular RAM, which matters because with too little RAM, the computer has difficulties handling DAZ, let alone DAZ and other uses at the same time). My original intent was indeed to wait until I could afford a much better computer, but then I had no computer at all, and finally a computer in very bad shape, so I'm not too sure of what I'm going to do. I won't jump on this one, though, as a result of this thread.
You should look to see if some one where you're at sells Dells or other mass market machines that have been refurbished. Here in the US you can often find those for $100 to $200 then all you need is to get a low to middle end new GPU for around $200 to get an OK gaming machine up and running (the same basically applies to DS iRay rendering).
It sounds like a good advice. I will look into this option.
It seems that in this price range, the only cards available would be the GTX1650 and GTX1660.
The 1660, 1660 Super, 1660 ti or 2060 are not the worst choices for budget iRay rendering cards.
The 2060 KO in particular is a very good card for rendering.
Thanks for the advice. The 2060 KO is about € 100 more, though.
Just kletting you know your options. As I wrote if you get a cheap PC without any GPU at all you'll still be able to surf the web and use DS just iRay renders will be very slow so you'd be better off doing 3Delight ones while you save some money.