What is the best Graphic Card to maximise IRay rendering time?

nicstt

baldorvadras_b61092790d said:

Hello,

I'm willing to migrate to IRay but as for now it's still impossible to work with it since I only have a GeForce GTX 970 Turbo, 4Gb. 

I want to reduce considerably my render times and I'd like advise to what GPU is best to acquire, like the Titan X, or the GTX 980 Ti. 

My motherboard is Asus X-99A, CPU is i7 hexacore.

Thank you.

980ti and 970 are the best balance cash and time; 980ti is getting rarer. Depends where you are, but I know some are still available in the UK.

A consideration is how big are the scenes you do? 4GB few items, couple of figures without having to render in layers to make it fit on the card; 6GB is another couple of figures or so. The Titan has 12GB.

When using more than one card: Cards do NOT share memory. SLI is a hinderance not a help.

nicstt

Petercat said:

LayLo 3D said:

DDCreate said:

So I guess my question was if a 6GB would overpower my 4GB but if i am understanding some other things you said correctly, I would be working with 10GB total and things would be better. I doubt I my system can handle much more as it is a 600w system.

For Iray, having a 6GB VRAM card and a 4GB VRAM card would be fine, but together Iray wouldn't consider it 10GB VRAM to work with. The entire scene has to be loaded to each individual card. Meaning, if your scene required more than 4GB VRAM Iray would exclude the 4GB card from the render job. If the scene required less than 4GB VRAM, Iray would use both cards. 

As far as your long render time, there are other factors at play. Sometimes doing renders one after another your VRAM will get full and to render a scene that would normally fit in your card's VRAM Iray will switch to CPU rendering and you have to restart Daz Studio to get the VRAM to dump it's contents. I wrote about this on my blog as well, and possibly more thoroughly... If you're a Windows PC user, and you render with only your GPUs checked, you can hit CTRL + ALT + DELETE, open up Task Manager, and see what percentage your CPU is being used. If Iray is using your GPUs exclusively, it shouldn't be at 100% in normal circumstances. If it is at 100% or close to it, then Iray is probably using your CPU to render and you might save your scene, restart Daz Studio and start the render over again, unless it's the first render you've done since you started Daz Studio. If it's your first render, it probably means your scene is too large to fit in the card's VRAM...

I hope that helps and answers your questions.

Laylo, is there any advantage to having identical cards? I have a MSI 980ti Gold, and want to add another soon, but they're getting a bit scarce.

If they are similar (ie two 980ti), then not really; one can be throttled speed-wise to another (slower card). Different memory amounts on the cards might get one less utilised if the scene takes up more memory than it can manage.

nicstt

towdow3 said:

you all are the bomb.com. i have a 2gb gtx 670. my render times aren't really long (2 figures about 20 minutes in iRay with NO background) but i do want to not have to wait around for 30 minutes. im running an 08 octocore mac pro with 16 gb ram and i'll upgrade to 32 soon. so should i get the Rx480 or a 980ti? i LOVE the 480 price point and the 8gb ram too....

Only Nvidia cards work with IRAY.

You can use Cycles in Blender with AMD cards, but there are still some features not fully utilised for AMD cards. So you could export the scene and render it in Blender; it isn't trivial though. :)

(I was an AMD fan, and I waited three years before finally getting fed up of waiting for it to be sorted; I'm now a Nvidia user - reluctantly, but they offer what I need.)

jrlaudio

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Quadro. The OP asked for "the best". The Quadro M6000 24GB would be the best option, especially since Quadro are already optmized more for this type of application (deep computing), where GTX is optimized more for gaming (displayed graphics). Iray was also orginally designed with Quadro in mind. Of course, this is assuming cost is no option, which is what can come when asking "what is the best".

It's funny to me how many people do not even know about Quadro, and if they do just think they are the same as whatever GTX has tha same VRAM or are just overpriced variants. They are not. Certain parts of CUDA and VRAM are defeated in GTX, since those types of deep compute functions are not utilized by game developers or needed by gamers, but can be utilized by Iray (or any CUDA, DirectCompute or OpenCL capable render engine).

However, until the Pascal version of Iray comes available, I certainly concur that as of this writing the Titan X (maxwell) is the "best" GTX, and the 980ti the best bang for the buck.

Deke

I have an older mac pro (2008...Jeez that really is old now)...and two 680 cards. It has worked well until some recent crashing problems.  Crashes every time I render in Iray now (started another thread on that).  Maybe it's time to look into a PC for my daz studio work.