Graphics card question PCI-e 2.0 vs 3.0
I have a terribly old system at the moment and the cheapest way for me to boost it was to buy myself a semi decent graphics card. I am now running an NVIDIA GTX750 which is PCIe v3.0. My motherboard, CPU and RAM all need replacing, but my question is this: If I buy a reasonable price motherboard that has PCIe 2.0 allowing me to buy more RAM or a faster CPU will my render times be better than if... I bought an expensive motherboard with a smaller amount of RAM?
What do you think? Is the bandwidth of PCIe v2 going to slow me down?
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Comments
Howdy I_stowe,
Your question is a little confusing for me, but I will see if I can help. PCIe 3.0 is approximately twice as fast as PCIe 2.0 for the same number of lanes (typically x4, x8, or X16). Which means that a PCIe 3.0 x4 performs the same as PCIe 2.0 x8, PCIe 3.0 x8 the same as PCIe 2.0 x16. Graphic cards are typically either x8 or x16, and in most current workloads, a PCIe 2.0 x8 is still sufficient. However, I don't see how this relates to your quesiton about your motherboard, RAM and CPU. For 3D rendering with DAZ Studio (and Carrara for that matter), the most important attributes are the number of threads and the clockspeed. Intel CPUs (at least as of Dec 2016) will always render faster than a compariable AMD CPU. Then we have RAM, more is better to a point (there is a point where adding more will not show any improvements), with 8 GBs being the absolute minimum you would want in a modern machine, with 16 GBs becomign more common. However the nVidia Iray renderere included in DAZ Studio adds yet another wrinkle to this. Iray can use your nVIdia based GPU to help with rendering, and it is many times faster than your CPU, but.... the entire scene must be able to fit in the onboard GPU memory (not your system memory). Most cards of the GTX750 era had around 2 GBs of onboard RAM, which from my experience is too little for most of my scenes. If you want to embrace the Iray renderer, and use GPU acceleration, you will want a GPU that has as much onboard memory as you can get. It would be better to "skimp" out on your system RAM (stick with 8 GBs) and get 6 - 8 GBs on your GPU for use with Iray.
Does any of this answer your question? Thanks!
Rich S.
Looking at it from a slightly different perspective, assuming that you are keeping the GTX 750, most, if not all, but the simplest renders are going to default to your CPU and not use the GPU anyway, if using Iray. If using 3Delight, it doesn't use the GPU for rendering either. So PCIe 3 vs 2 isn't going to make a big difference. If, on the other hand, you were looking at spending money to upgrade the graphics card to something with 4 GB or more onboard memory, then maybe the PCIe bandwidth might be a concern if you wished to squeeze the maximum performance from the card, but I doubt it would be a deal-breaker for most people.