Graphics card question
Wonderland
Posts: 6,742
So I might finally upgrade to an RTX 3060ti and notice that Amazon has several brands. Is there a real difference between the brands or are all 3060tis the same? Also if I have two graphic cards installed, how does that work? Can DS (or any program) use both at the same time? Instead of dropping to CPU, would it go to the old 1080ti instead? Thanks.
Post edited by Wonderland on
Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
224 S 200 W, Suite #250
Salt Lake City, UT 84101
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2024 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
There's not really a difference if you don't mess with overclocking. I don't overclock but plenty of gamers do. I'd go for the best price regardless of brand name or the best price for the same brand that you have for your motherboard, eg MSI video card & motherboard, Gigabyte, ASUS, and others.
I'm currently runnig a 1080 TI and a 3060; Studio uses both, with very occasionally the 1080 TI dropping out - that extra GB on the 3060 sometimes makes a difference. I looked at the 3080 TI, but the cost/benefit comes down heavily on the 3060.
I'm holding out, waiting to see if theere will be a 40 series equivalent to the 3060; if not, I'll be replacing the 1080 TI with a second 3060 by the end of the year.
It is true with a lot of these newer DAZ hairs that more memory is needed but you only render single person portraits right? A 3060TI is fine on memory for that.
With single person portraits, probably. But I would still think the 3060 with 12 GB would be the better way to go as you might change and decide to start doing scenes with HDRIs, maybe throw another figure in and boom that extra memory comes in handy.
With somewhat recent releases, the 8GB VRAM on 3060Ti becomes a limiting factor even with just one figure, the 3060 12GB gives double the VRAM for Iray rendering, why shoot oneself in the foot.
All brands are not the same. There are 3060ti's with 12gb but they also require pcie4.0, ya also gotta consider slot size, port, power, and fans. Some of the 3060ti's depending on brand have extra over locking and monitoring which can be nice.
for your art 8gb would be fine ........but....why not future proof a bit a get a 12gb card.
I have a rtx 3080ti 12gb. I'm regularly at 13gb and scene optimization I get to 9gb. Pushing the limits I've only done one scene which was 22gb. Daz studio eat VRAM and cuda's but I'm doing scenes with lots of textures, multiple figures props etc. mostly being lazy and seeing what's possible. For normal use 8gb 1 or 2 figures in a scene at high rez with large textures and I'm fine at 12gb. Just a thought
Who makes 12GB 3060Ti? I haven't seen any.
Even when a card supports PCI 4.0, it doesn't require it - Works just fine with PCI 3 motherboard.
sorry got confused by different rtx card models and VRAM GB. Amazon likes to slip extra in the listings and I thought there was a rtx 3060ti 12gb. My bad. I still stick with more VRAM and CUDA you get the better, but go with what ya can afford I guess.
Thanks everyone. I had to bring my computer in for repair for something else and the store owner is selling me a 3060ti for less than Amazon that he says is the best and he has 5 star Yelp reviews and really takes a lot of time with customers and knows what he's doing, but never heard of DAZ. Hopefully I didn't make a mistake not getting the 12GB one. Also no tax (which is really high here) if I pay cash. The price is pretty reasonable, I think about the same as my original new 1080ti was. I thought the price would be much higher but I guess prices went down since they can't be used for crypto mining anymore. I think it's just 8GB vRAM but I'll still have my 1080ti which sounds like I could still make use of before it drops to CPU. I'm upgrading regular RAM too but I get the feeling none of this will help me load Genesis 8 faster with all the characters and morphs I have. And I do have Turbo Loader (or whatever it is called,) but I hate limiting my character mixtures and am very spontaneous with my morph mixtures but hopefully this will help a lot with renders at least!
I just found this on the internet: https://www.makeuseof.com/what-is-the-difference-3060-vs-3060-ti/
"Both cards use Samsung's 8nm technology process, but the number of transistors differs. The RTX 3060 contains 13.25 billion transistors, while the RTX 3060 Ti has a transistor count of 17.4 billion. More transistors typically indicate a newer, faster processor.
However, the RTX 3060, is the slightly newer model, built atop the Ampere GA106 GPU die. The RTX 3060 Ti, on the other hand, is based on the physically bigger GA104 GPU die, for lesser heat concentration.
One noticeable difference between the two is memory size. The 3060 has 12GB GDDR6 while the 3060 Ti contains 8GB GDDR6. The 3060 also has a boost clock of 1777 MHz, which is higher than the 3060 Ti's 1,665 MHz, so it's expected to be the faster GPU. But that's not the case.
The RTX 3060 contains 3,584 CUDA cores and a core clock performance of 1,320 MHz, while the 3060 Ti has 4,864 CUDA cores and a core clock performance of 1410 MHz.
Despite the lesser VRAM and a lower boost clock, the RTX 3060 Ti offers better performance. One of the reasons for this is that the 3060 only has a 192-bit memory bus, compared to the 256-bit memory bus on the 3060 Ti. This means there's lesser data exchange within the 3060, further translating to a lower overall bandwidth for the GPU."
Ugh, but re-reading everything everybody wrote, maybe I should go for the 360 12 GB
Could anyone tell me what the difference is between these two cards?
https://www.amazon.com/ASUS-Graphics-DisplayPort-Axial-tech-Technology/dp/B0985X2YR1/ref=sr_1_4?crid=DGOPV50N1W0Z&keywords=rtx%2B3060%2B12gb&qid=1675845758&refinements=p_85%3A2470955011&rnid=2470954011&rps=1&sprefix=rtx%2B3060%2Caps%2C250&sr=8-4&th=1
and
https://www.amazon.com/ASUS-DisplayPort-Axial-tech-Protective-Auto-Extreme/dp/B09CBS8ZF3/ref=sr_1_7?crid=DGOPV50N1W0Z&keywords=rtx%2B3060%2B12gb&qid=1675845758&refinements=p_85%3A2470955011&rnid=2470954011&rps=1&sprefix=rtx%2B3060%2Caps%2C250&sr=8-7&th=1
I agree with what everyone else said, go with the 3060 and not the ti. Your 1080ti has 11GB iirc so not only are you getting a gigantic speed boost, you're also getting an extra GB to work with.
I looked at those links and the only difference I see is that one is a single fan solution and the other is a dual fan solution because they aren't listing the speed of the memory, but the single fan card may just be a bit slower but that doesn't matter too much thanks to how CUDA/RTX works. The single fan will save space but you may run into throttling with high temps from rendering for long periods of time and the fan may be a bit noisy. It's better to get at least a dual fan card because rendering pushes out a lot of heat that a single fan may simply not be able to handle efficiently.
Don't worry about a lot of what those reviews say, most of them are geared towards gamers, so a lot of it doesn't apply to rendering in DS. 192 bit vs 256 bit bus doesn't matter either, the scene is loaded on the card at the beginning of the rendering process which is why renders that are too big for a cards memory fail immediately and not half way through. You may have to wait 1 second more for the info to be loaded to a 3060 vs the 3060ti but that's it, once it's loaded in the gpu, bus speed/bandwidth shouldn't be a factor anymore.
I don't think you are going to see a lot of difference between those two cards.... Given the choice, I'd take the one with two fans, unless I was pressed for space.... the single fan might be smaller.
I went from a 1060 6gb to the 3060 12gb, best value card going. Sadly, the 4060 is only supposed to have 8gb of VRAM.... though it is supposed to have the speed of a 3070Ti.
https://wccftech.com/nvidia-geforce-rtx-4070-rtx-4060-graphics-cards-expected-to-launch-in-q2-2023/
To us, VRAM is kind of king.... so I am glad I got my 3060 12GB for $330 back in December.
The speed difference between 3060ti and 3060 12GB is negligible in DS+Iray, but in practice one can have double the VRAM available to Iray rendering on the 12GB card as the baseload of Windows, DS, the scene and the needed "Working Space" by the process are taking around 4GB's of VRAM.
Main difference is the cooling system and as a result the dimensions of the cards: the first one has two smaller fans, the second one has one big fan, so the one with 2 fans is thinner (it will only take 2 slots in height) and a bit longer, while the one with one fan is shorter but takes more space height-wise.
Whatever your choice, don't dawdle, grab it before it's gone. The RTX-30xx series are selling like hotcakes because the 40xx series isn't selling well. I agree with replies above, the 3060 12GB, "Dual" (2-fan) is a very good fit for DAZ Studio and our type of use. But if you're making long animations you might need a faster card that will finish before your hair turns grey.
But don't skimp on the GBs. For DAZ, 12 is better than 8.
Thanks everyone! I went with the 3060 12GB.
I do think you went for the right choice on that. Should work well on its own and in conjunction with the 1080. It isn't the fastest, but will keep working when other cards run out of Vram.
Regards,
Richard
Every 3060 is going to be roughly the same. The main differences are always going to be with the cooler on the card. Some chips can clock a little higher, and so these might get binned as the higher clocked models. Given that these cards might be doing a lot of work, I would lean towards a decent cooler, at least dual fans on this one. It isn't super important, but excess heat can break a GPU down over time, so being cooler is generally good.
But you do Iray. Iray is nothing like any video game, so gaming advice really doesn't apply. Gamers are less obsessed with VRAM. The 3060ti is faster, no question. But the 3060ti for some crazy reason has just 8GB of VRAM. You have to be absolutely 100% sure you will never need that extra 4GB of VRAM. The thing is, you have a 1080ti, so any 8GB card is going to be a step down in VRAM compared to what you are used to.
I think the 3060 is a safer choice for Daz users. The speed is great, but if you exceed VRAM you get ZERO speed. So that VRAM can be extremely important. You either have enough or you don't, there is no in between.
You can totally use the 3060 with the 1080ti and render together. I did it myself with exactly these cards. However, I did get more crashes with this setup, and I am not sure why. Maybe my 1080ti was having an issue, but it rendered fine by itself, so I am not convinced it was my 1080ti. Just make sure you save before hitting 'render'. I kind of think the GTX cards are basically forgotten by Iray at this point. You'll see that your new 3060 will be quite a bit faster than the 1080ti. If I recall, the 3060 can be twice as fast, or more. If you can get both cards running, you will see even more. Of course, this means more power, so it is good to make sure your PC can handle an extra card. Thankfully the 3060 doesn't use much power.
The RTX cards actually use a tiny bit less memory than the GTX cards do. This is because ray tracing cores have to be emulated on GTX cards. So not only do you get more memory on the 3060 12GB, but you can fit a bit more than you could even if your 1080ti had the same 12GB. So that extra 1GB feels bigger. It isn't drastic, but you may notice your 1080ti dropping out of some renders while the 3060 keeps going.
Just another note, you may not need to update Daz Studio to use the 3060, either, unless your DS is very old.