Best Graphics card for IRAY

NW316

I love the new IRAY in DS 4.8 beta. I can't manage the time however as I am concentrating on animations. I've been looking at a GTX 970 or 980. Does anyone have recommendations regarding the best graphics card (consumer level) to use for IRAY?

Thanks!

Don

NW316

Additionally, my PC is an HP Envy 700 with an i5 core, 28 GB of RAMwith a GTi 750.

Zilvergrafix

GTX 780ti SC

NW316

Thanks, Zilver

kyoto kid

...If you can afford it, a Titan X with 12GB. If not, wait a bit as Nvidia will be upgrading both the GTX 970 & 980 to 8 GB and they should be comparable in price to the 4 GB versions.

Serefina_Moon

Perhaps, useful,.. no?  :)

Reading this list, vs the pricing at store local to me, to get twice the performance of the GTX 750 ti, I'd pay more then 4 times as much for a GTX 980.
And for 3 times the performance of the 750ti,... 8 times the price for a Titan X.
Ouch,... my accounts say no.

http://www.migenius.com/products/nvidia-iray/iray-benchmarks-2015

 

NW316

I went with the 980 GTX Ti and it's is definetely 3X faster and worth the price.  I try to set up scenes with minimal backgrounds, - just character movements to cut down rendering times and the iRay is working out.  Also picked up the iRadiance pk for environmental lighting.  

SnowSultan

I'm surprised to see the GeForce GTX 780 Ti with higher Iray performance than a GTX 980 and at almost half the price. 

NW316

Interesting, I hadn't seen that, but I did see how the 980Ti compares very close to the Titan for half its price.

 

alan bard newcomer

the 7 series is newer than the 9 series... smoke and mirrors... 
way back I had a pair of gtx 6800 256s and got a great deal on a couple gts 8500s with 512g ... and they are actually not as good.
there's a website called cpu benchmark that has videocard benchmarks also... worth check there when looking for cards

 

alan bard newcomer

which leads to why I was searching for info...
I was going to toddle along with just letting my cpus do the rendering but I need a new video card for Fallout 4 
so am trying to decide between two cards (either will be good for the game) but which

is best for iray.
In roughly the same price range (used) I can get a 
gtx 780 Ti with 3 gigs of ram and 2880 cuda cores and a speed of 7 Gbps
or a
gtx 780 with 6 gigs of ram and 2304 cuda cores and a speed of 6 Gbps
---
the one will increase the chance that the rendering can go straight to the card while the other has an increase in cuda cores
----
I had figured that my scenes which often use 20 gs of ram wouldn't fit in the video card ram for rendering but then I noticed once when I was using reality which opens Lux that Lux was only using a few gigs of ram ...
--
when rendering in Daz you don't get a seperate exe for 3dl or Iray...
---
is there a guideline for how much memory a scene really uses in the render stage?
 

mtl1

The most important spec to look for is the CUDA core count, which is why the 780Ti beats the 980.

However, the 780Ti only comes in a 3GB variant, which may be limiting in terms of your scene size. For reference, I've easily hit 3GB in most of my scenes, which makes me thankful that I bought a card with 4GB (the 960 4GB card).

alan bard newcomer

my scene sizes are often in the 15 gig and larger range... my cats are about 1.5 g each.
but I only see a small increase in ram usage during rendering and when I tried the same scene in lux render ... it didn't use more than about 3 gigs for ram even though the scene was 20 gigs which makes me wonder how much ram is really used in the rendering part, which would be the part transferred to the card if the card had enough ram?
---
this image maxed out my old computer with 12 characters and the base of 20gs, 2gs for the system and 2 gs left for all the rest... 
but how much ram did the rendering itself use ... would it fit on a 3 or 6 gig card?

 

 

NW316

Sorry I don't know anything about CUDA Core, but I only know when I had the 750GTX Ti in, one frame took 37.5 min and when replacing with the 980 Ti, the time dropped to just over 11min.  Also, if I only use the GPU, the render times are quicker than including CPU (Quad @ 3.00GHz) and my system runs better while rendering and running other apps.  The 980 I purchased for $670 thru B&H Video Supply a month ago has 6GB. 

alexhcowley

kyoto kid said:

...If you can afford it, a Titan X with 12GB. If not, wait a bit as Nvidia will be upgrading both the GTX 970 & 980 to 8 GB and they should be comparable in price to the 4 GB versions.

Any news on how many cuda cores they will have?  I'd be seriously interested in the Pascal version of the 980ti, in about nine months or so.

Cheers,

Alex.

alan bard newcomer

the 750 ti only has 640 cuda cores...
the 980 has 2048 cores 
but the 780 has 2304 cores and a 384 bit memory interface has compared to 256 on the 980
----
my 6 year old radeon 4890 still is on the list of high end cards because it was a very good card when it was new... 
and if the second one I have was working and I could crossfire them they would be about equal to a little under a gtx 560ti but without cuda cores ...
---
but the 7xx series is the current one... the 9xx is the older one...
if you go to nvidas home pabe and go to desktop cards they only show the 7xx series... you have to dig to find the 9xx series...
but here are the links to the pages for each series.
for the 7xx series http://www.nvidia.com/gtx-700-graphics-cards/gtx-780/
for the 9xx series http://www.geforce.com/hardware/desktop-gpus/geforce-gtx-980/specifications

 

frank0314

Damn and I only have a 960 w/4GB. Guess I should update to the 980Ti like the wife has with a bunch of RAM

alan bard newcomer

the 960s only have 1024 cuda cores and a 128 bit memory interface
(even the 760s have 1152 and 256 bit interface) 

---
the 960 has a 5,972 rating a passmark and a 980 ti has 8,072 rating
but for 3d the difference would be the cuda and memory interface
the 980 ti has 2816 cores and a 384 bit width...

alan bard newcomer

this is the passmark link for video cards... but you have to take into account the cuda cores which this benchmark probably doesn't address
http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html

mtl1

alan bard newcomer said:

the 960s only have 1024 cuda cores and a 128 bit memory interface
(even the 760s have 1152 and 256 bit interface) 

---
the 960 has a 5,972 rating a passmark and a 980 ti has 8,072 rating
but for 3d the difference would be the cuda and memory interface
the 980 ti has 2816 cores and a 384 bit width...

The bus width is almost inconsequential with regards to most applications, as there aren't many scenarios which will saturate it to 100%. Personally, I've never seen any render limited by the bus width either (monitoring the link through GPU-Z, etc).

alan bard newcomer

any idea what say a 10g scene in ram requires in memory on a video card to render?

 

Havos

alan bard newcomer said:

any idea what say a 10g scene in ram requires in memory on a video card to render?

 

There is no easy formula to say what it will be, it depends very much on the scene. For example if your scene contains any figures (particularly Genesis 1-3) these can be using 100's of MBs each for the morphs in main memory, but these are not sent to the graphics card, only the final mesh. To get a better idea of how much that figure will use of the graphics card, convert it to a prop first, and then the in program memory use will be much closer to that sent to the GPU memory. In addition I believe the iRay renderer does some fancy stuff with the texture files to make sure they are more likely to fit into the graphics memory available.

alan bard newcomer

thanks, will try that... as my cat's are a fat 1.5 gigs a piece in ram

---
well, searching forums or google for 
converting genesis to prop 
no answers
---
any info would be appreciated...
--

 

Zilvergrafix

mtl1 said:

The most important spec to look for is the CUDA core count, which is why the 780Ti beats the 980.

However, the 780Ti only comes in a 3GB variant, which may be limiting in terms of your scene size. For reference, I've easily hit 3GB in most of my scenes, which makes me thankful that I bought a card with 4GB (the 960 4GB card).

 

That's a myth with the memory full scene allocation inside the videocard, just export all your scene in OBJ and count the textures for size, bingo...it does not need even 1Gb for textures...duh!

even with 12Gb or memory video you STILL WILL NEED a lot of simple and normal DDR3 memory for preview rendering AND iray GPU rendering.

WHY?, dunno, but it does, and I have a GTX780Ti.

alan bard newcomer

I was looking at the 780 ti... but as you said only 3 g but there are 780s with 6g
and the cuda difference is 2880 on the ti and 2305 on the 780
so the question is 25 % more cudas or twice as much ram on the gpu.
---
cpu ram I have 64 of ddr4... so that's covered. 
===
my base scenes in daz often hit 18/20g of ram

Ruphuss

thers a little tool called gpu_z

http://www.chip.de/downloads/GPU-Z_29079230.html

tells how full is your gpu

Havos

Zilvergrafix said:

mtl1 said:

The most important spec to look for is the CUDA core count, which is why the 780Ti beats the 980.

However, the 780Ti only comes in a 3GB variant, which may be limiting in terms of your scene size. For reference, I've easily hit 3GB in most of my scenes, which makes me thankful that I bought a card with 4GB (the 960 4GB card).

 

That's a myth with the memory full scene allocation inside the videocard, just export all your scene in OBJ and count the textures for size, bingo...it does not need even 1Gb for textures...duh!

even with 12Gb or memory video you STILL WILL NEED a lot of simple and normal DDR3 memory for preview rendering AND iray GPU rendering.

WHY?, dunno, but it does, and I have a GTX780Ti.

When you were counting the texture sizes, where looking at their file sizes only? Since they are likely to be jpg, I am fairly sure this is not how they will be send to the graphics card, as accessing a texture as a jpg during render is likely to be very slow. More likely the textures will be expanded in memory into a format that is much more efficent, but will use a lot more memory.

nicstt

alan bard newcomer said:

I was looking at the 780 ti... but as you said only 3 g but there are 780s with 6g
and the cuda difference is 2880 on the ti and 2305 on the 780
so the question is 25 % more cudas or twice as much ram on the gpu.
---
cpu ram I have 64 of ddr4... so that's covered. 
===
my base scenes in daz often hit 18/20g of ram

Those are basically two cards, so you wont have access to all the memory, only half.

Jim_1831252

When I was trying to figure out what cards to get it came down to 980ti or 780ti. I tend to render "smaller" scenes so the performance and price of the 780ti made it very competitive. Due to how the scenes are optimised I've had very few issues with running out of RAM, so you really can't do a one to one when you are thinking of RAM usage when you're using something like 3Delight VS Iray. I now have two 780ti cards.

I actually put an article about this together forDigiSprawl http://www.digisprawl.com/blog/hardware/iray-and-octane-render-for-daz-studio-which-graphics-card-is-best/

kyoto kid

NW316 said:

Interesting, I hadn't seen that, but I did see how the 980Ti compares very close to the Titan for half its price.

 

...the one difference is the memory, the Titan X has twice the video memory of hte 980TI.  That is important if you create very complex and detailed scenes. Once the render process defaults to the CPU, those 3,072 CUDA cores mean nothing.

Last I saw, the the 980 TI was about 375$ less than the Titan X made by the same company, so not quite half price.

NW316

I think you're right, Kyoto.