Choosing a new Nvidia Card for iRay Rendering

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  • kyoto kidkyoto kid Posts: 40,570
    edited December 1969

    thd777 said:
    I have an ASUS GTX780ti 3Gb. It is an awesome card and can do some quite complex scenes. I have three cards in my system and the GTX780ti is the fastest, even faster than the newer GTX 980 4Gb (The third card is an older 400 series card that just drives the monitors). If possible use on-board graphics or a cheap card to drive your display. That way you have all the memory for rendering.
    Also make sure the box has good cooling and a substantial power supply (I have a 1050W PSU).
    Ciao
    TD

    ...my scenes would "eat" either of those cards.

    Not even sure 6GB (GTX Titan, Titan Black, GTX 980TI) is enough as in 3DL and Lux I've had scenes top 10.5 GB (out of 11 GB available memory) and go into swap mode. Even if Iray optimises textures & such so that the render file would be about 1/2 as large as in 3DL, it means I'd be hitting the 6 GB ceiling rather easily. Wish that Nvidia offered an 8GB GTX card to compete with the Sapphire Radeon R9 290X Vapor-X as the only one available is the 2,500$ Quadro K5200.

    The only other solution I see would be a Titan X at 1,000$.

  • kyoto kidkyoto kid Posts: 40,570
    edited December 1969

    Yes is funny, DS iray hates me yet my GTX 760 is quite sufficient for Octane render in Carrara using out of core textures.
    Not so much Octane render DS as I only have 1.2 and no intention to upgrade at this point, though it does handle some DAZ scenes Carrara cannot and LAMH geometry.
    On the otherhand iray nearly always reverts to CPU render for me and 3delight is quicker!

    ...If I am not correct, doesn't Octane have a pretty decent hybrid rendering mode. Iray's is almost as slow as pure CPU.
  • kyoto kidkyoto kid Posts: 40,570
    edited December 1969


    No portfolio....
    I got stupid lucky and worked for a large company in their engineering department doing mostly technical stuff. I also had an electronics technologists degree (thanks to the Air Force) which helped me get the job. The job wasn't terribly glamorous but the pay was steady and I'm now retired on an indexed pension (Yippee!). I'm still working part time providing all manner of graphics to a small company that makes online technical training. Again, terribly un-glamorous but the extra money is nice and going into an office three days a week gives me the social interaction I crave.

    DevianArt page?, neither a personal website?, nothing? or a Daz Gallery?,
    dude come on!, even me, a mediocre 3d artist have a simple devianArt page!!
    ...even I have one.
  • StratDragonStratDragon Posts: 3,167
    edited June 2015

    From what I read the Quadro cards game at the same level as low end 700 series card, they are strictly workstations optimized for one thing and it's not Arkham Asylum, but so far out of my price range (if I didn't need to eat, buy gas or pay for a home, sure) so I'm still watching the price on the 960 4GB but wondering if 4GB is going to work out for me or do I wait another generation and hope 8GB cards become the mainstream.

    Kyoto Kid said:
    ...
    ...even I have one.

    DeviantArt has digressed into a spam interface, unless you pay for a subscription building your gallery can be akin to pulling out your teeth with rusty pliers. How a site can justify charging users for basic tools (batch loading, batch delete, etc.) when the artists supply the content to generate traffic to their site is loathsome. DA is a sweat shop for the talented.
    Post edited by StratDragon on
  • kyoto kidkyoto kid Posts: 40,570
    edited December 1969

    ...AdBlocker+ makes it a bit easier to tolerate.

    ...but yeah to get the best tools you have to go for a paid membership. I remember when it was only 7.95$ a year when I first signed up back in '07.

  • DrNewcensteinDrNewcenstein Posts: 816
    edited December 1969

    Kinda wishing I would have found this thread earlier; I picked up a 4GB 980 about a week ago, and while it gets the job done, it seems I could've done better.

    I'm currently running two machines - a "gaming rig" with the 980 (which replaced the 4GB 760), i7-4770K, 32GB RAM, and an older used HPZ600 workstation with dual Xeon X5650s, which I upgraded to 48GB RAM and replaced the FX1800 card with a K4000 4GB.

    Setting up both machines with the same scene, I'm getting comparable render times between the two. On some scenes/settings, however, one will be faster than the other, so it doesn't really look like one is the clear winner over the other. Total cost of each machine was also about the same (what with the cost of the RAM and K4000).


    However, another point regarding gaming cards vs workstation cards; as I understand it, workstation cards run a bit slower than gaming cards for stability during long renders. The EVGA-branded cards come with an app that lets you adjust the clock speed up or down, and in my informal tests, setting the clock speed down on the 760 did improve stability, especially with Luxrender (which otherwise crashed when the render neared "completion").

    But the 980 is as stable as the K4000, so that's a plus.
    I guess.

  • kyoto kidkyoto kid Posts: 40,570
    edited December 1969

    ..do you mean the Quadro K4200? the K4000 had only 3 GB GDDR5.

  • DrNewcensteinDrNewcenstein Posts: 816
    edited December 1969

    Yeah, my bad - the K4000 with 3GB.

  • kyoto kidkyoto kid Posts: 40,570
    edited December 1969

    ...there was a K4000 with 4GB but just for the MacPro

  • DAZ_SpookyDAZ_Spooky Posts: 3,100
    edited December 1969

    Kyoto Kid said:
    ...there was a K4000 with 4GB but just for the MacPro

    The Mac K4000 was 2GB, it is the Mac K5000 with 4GB. (Neither is currently in production.)

    Currently the only Mac you can, officially, get with an NVIDIA card that has 4GB of Ram is the second highest model iMac and that is a mobile card. (Half the cores of a desktop card.)

  • kyoto kidkyoto kid Posts: 40,570
    edited December 1969

    ...it was the K4000M.

  • StratDragonStratDragon Posts: 3,167
    edited December 1969

    Kyoto Kid said:
    ...there was a K4000 with 4GB but just for the MacPro

    The Mac K4000 was 2GB, it is the Mac K5000 with 4GB. (Neither is currently in production.)

    Currently the only Mac you can, officially, get with an NVIDIA card that has 4GB of Ram is the second highest model iMac and that is a mobile card. (Half the cores of a desktop card.)

    Unofficially however Mac users often find that Mac will state a model of computer has a specific limit that they state which is apparently not the limit of the computer in the real world. Unofficially you can add some higher end cards either directly to your logic board or through an external connection over Thunderbolt or Thunderbotl2
    http://www.macvidcards.com/store/p7/Nvidia_GTX_Titan_6_GB.html

  • DAZ_SpookyDAZ_Spooky Posts: 3,100
    edited December 1969

    Kyoto Kid said:
    ...there was a K4000 with 4GB but just for the MacPro

    The Mac K4000 was 2GB, it is the Mac K5000 with 4GB. (Neither is currently in production.)

    Currently the only Mac you can, officially, get with an NVIDIA card that has 4GB of Ram is the second highest model iMac and that is a mobile card. (Half the cores of a desktop card.)

    Unofficially however Mac users often find that Mac will state a model of computer has a specific limit that they state which is apparently not the limit of the computer in the real world. Unofficially you can add some higher end cards either directly to your logic board or through an external connection over Thunderbolt or Thunderbotl2
    http://www.macvidcards.com/store/p7/Nvidia_GTX_Titan_6_GB.html

    Yes you can, however since Apple does not support those configurations, officially, we can't.

  • SedorSedor Posts: 1,764
    edited December 1969


    Unofficially however Mac users often find that Mac will state a model of computer has a specific limit that they state which is apparently not the limit of the computer in the real world. Unofficially you can add some higher end cards either directly to your logic board or through an external connection over Thunderbolt or Thunderbotl2
    http://www.macvidcards.com/store/p7/Nvidia_GTX_Titan_6_GB.html

    I am using currently a 980Ti in a external PCIe case, connected by Thunderbolt 2 - works great with DS.

  • DrNewcensteinDrNewcenstein Posts: 816
    edited December 1969

    I've been looking into the eGPU options, and I'm saddened to see that no one is considering this market beyond the "Big Business" model. No one is targeting the freelance/hobbyist market with a multi-gpu-capable add-your-own-cards enclosure. MSI and Aliendell are looking at proprietary connections to their laptops for gaming, but those can't translate to the average Iray user due to the interface and single-card enclosures.

    Nvidia's VCA is the ideal platform for a DIY setup, where we mere mortals could populate it with GTX-series cards for a lot less than the M6000s.

    While Thunderbolt allows several devices daisy-chained, that would take several enclosures and separate power supplies to do a respectable rendering setup, and cost about twice what it should at least.

  • StrixowlStrixowl Posts: 301

    Following Forum :)

  • ZilvergrafixZilvergrafix Posts: 1,385

    Overclocking or not Overclocking?,

    below a comparative of iterations in Default and Overclocked mode.

    that is the question, in my perspective, I think there are minimal gains forcing the card to its limits, personally I prefer not fry my +$900 USD card for now.

    overanddefault.png
    884 x 864 - 448K
    motherofGODw.jpg
    616 x 542 - 94K
  • Kevin SandersonKevin Sanderson Posts: 1,643

    KK, you can always render parts of your scene separately and then composite them. Gets you around all kinds of problems, and less stuff in a scene means a faster render. You do end up saving time.

  • Kevin SandersonKevin Sanderson Posts: 1,643
    edited July 2015

    Zilvergrafix, your ASUS card was reviewed the most stable out of the bunch of high end cards they tested on a site recently (EDIT: High end when they were current). Stability is more important in my book than overclocking. I would spend your time figuring how you can split up your scene renders and composite like I suggested to Kyoto Kid. It really will save time. Iray also renders faster with more light. Maybe it can be compensated with tone mapping. I have an ASUS 780ti OC card arriving the beginning of next week.

     

    Post edited by Kevin Sanderson on
  • ZilvergrafixZilvergrafix Posts: 1,385

    Thanks for the tips!, Kevin.

    congratz for your new card arriving! laugh

  • kyoto kidkyoto kid Posts: 40,570
    edited July 2015

    KK, you can always render parts of your scene separately and then composite them. Gets you around all kinds of problems, and less stuff in a scene means a faster render. You do end up saving time.

    ...my issue with compositing is getting all the shadows to fall right, especially when there are a lot of items in the scene and some items cast shadows on others. I do not have a steady enough hand to "paint" them in. Rendering in layers also can mess with AO amd reflections as well.

    Considering I only have 1GB on my GPU, it would take a lot of layers to compose a scene, and I most likely couldn't even render a single clothed character without it dropping to CPU mode. Combine all the rendering times as well as the time and work involved to assemble the finished image and I'd just be better off rendering the entire scene in a single CPU render pass.

    Post edited by kyoto kid on
  • ZilvergrafixZilvergrafix Posts: 1,385
    edited July 2015

    Kevin, I think you're savvy with Nvidia technology, at least more than me, that's why I'm asking:

     

    Do you know why sometimes my card render very slow and mostly of times goes super faster?, and I'm talking about the same scene, only GPU and Optix enabled, and no overclocked mode.

    maybe you will answer when your  ASUS 780ti OC arrives and evaluate this issue in your PC.

     

    Of course!, if anyone have the answer or some reason for that, can give me tips too! 

     

     

    Post edited by Zilvergrafix on
  • nicsttnicstt Posts: 11,714
    edited July 2015

    Deleted

    Post edited by nicstt on
  • Kevin SandersonKevin Sanderson Posts: 1,643
    edited July 2015

    Kevin, I think you're savvy with Nvidia technology, at least more than me, that's why I'm asking:

     

    Do you know why sometimes my card render very slow and mostly of times goes super faster?, and I'm talking about the same scene, only GPU and Optix enabled, and no overclocked mode.

    maybe you will answer when your  ASUS 780ti OC arrives and evaluate this issue in your PC.

     

    Of course!, if anyone have the answer or some reason for that, can give me tips too! 

    I don't know if I'm that savvy, but I have been following it on and off for a while. I only have a GTX 470 at the moment and it's not fast at all. I have gotten different render times on the same scene, and I didn't change anything. And I don't think it was the same as when 3Delight optimizes textures the first time around, but maybe it's similar. When I get my new ASUS, I might know more. The one thing that comes to mind is in older Iray documentation, they mentioned a 5 second delay for some functions if you are also using the card as your display card. They said in that older documentation that the delay goes away if you use another card separately for your display. Maybe that's it. We'll see. I know that Octane devs always have recommended a second card just for your display. My older Silencer PSU, even though it's 750 watts can only support one card since it only has two 6+2 connectors so the ASUS will be doing everything until I can get a more recent PSU.

    Post edited by Kevin Sanderson on
  • fastbike1fastbike1 Posts: 4,074

    @Kevin Sanderson "even though it's 750 watts can only support one card"

    Do you have motherboard video? If so, you should be able to run your video from there.

  • Kevin SandersonKevin Sanderson Posts: 1,643
    fastbike1 said:

    @Kevin Sanderson "even though it's 750 watts can only support one card"

    Do you have motherboard video? If so, you should be able to run your video from there.

     Nope, no mobo video. 

  • vex3d_22560vex3d_22560 Posts: 130

    Does the 780TI not support SLI?

     

    I'm curious why no one has done x2 780Ti for ~$600

  • SLI isn't used for Iray.

  • mjc1016mjc1016 Posts: 15,001
    vex3d said:

    Does the 780TI not support SLI?

     

    I'm curious why no one has done x2 780Ti for ~$600

    Because for 3GB cards, it's not worth it?

    CUDA cores aren't going to matter if the scene won't fit in the card's memory, so a 4 GB card is more desirable than a 3 GB card.  I'd take a pair of 970s over a pair of 780s at that price.

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