Loading...
> >

Best GPU for rendering only

artphobeartphobe Posts: 97
in The Commons

Whats the best GPU I can get to speed up iray renders (more than the CPU - 6700k in this case) and would be the cheapest?

 

Say:

2x faster than the CPU = GeForce xxxx?

4x faster than the CPU = GeForce xxxx?

 

The reason being, I already have an AMD GPU for gaming (and freesync monitors), so Im really just interested in an nvidia card for rendering.

Comments

  • nonesuch00nonesuch00 Posts: 18,729
    edited January 2017

    Well it's my understanding if you want to spend less than $1000 than that would be the nVidia GTX 1080.

    Post edited by nonesuch00 on
  • HavosHavos Posts: 5,581

    To get a 4x speed up you would not need a card that is too expensive. My card is a GTX 970, and that gives me a roughly 10x speed up for around 250-300 USD. A 4x speed up should not cost much more that 150 USD, but you need to consider the memory size on the GPU. If you are looking for a budget buy, then I would recommend looking at the GTX 1050 or GTX 1060.

  • artphobeartphobe Posts: 97
    Havos said:

    To get a 4x speed up you would not need a card that is too expensive. My card is a GTX 970, and that gives me a roughly 10x speed up for around 250-300 USD. A 4x speed up should not cost much more that 150 USD, but you need to consider the memory size on the GPU. If you are looking for a budget buy, then I would recommend looking at the GTX 1050 or GTX 1060.

    Thanks, currently the renders im working on take about 2.5 hours to complete (CPU only). So a 30 min render would be a nice thing to have.

  • posecastposecast Posts: 386

    Dual 1070 may be the sweet spot.

  • alexhcowleyalexhcowley Posts: 2,403

    My experiences with the GTX 970 match Artphobe's.  If I was working to a budget, I would get a 10 series card with at least 6GB of memory.  Note that the 10 series is now officially supported by DAZ Studio, although you will need the latest release, 9.3.166.

    Cheers,

    Alex.

  • outrider42outrider42 Posts: 3,679

    Before diving in, you need to describe what your typical scene is. How large is it? And what kind of budget are you looking at? You want to make sure you have enough VRAM, because if you exceed that, your GPU drops out of rendering that scene, becoming worthless. So you want to make sure most scenes you like creating are going to fit.

    Because we could easily go nuts and say go for a Titan or a Tesla or something like that. 

    There are 2 basic stats: CUDA cores and VRAM. 

    CUDA cores are sort of like horsepower.

    VRAM is capacity.

    You cannot get a bunch of fat people into a 2 seat sports car, in this case, the wheels literally fall off, and they have to push the car themselves. Not good! So a good GPU will be one that gives you a reasonable amount of both. CUDA cores are not quite equal across generations of cards, newer ones are more efficient. So a 1000 CUDA cores from the year 2012 are not quite as good as 1000 CUDA cores of a new 2016 card.

    When having multiple GPUs, the CUDA counts will stack, but NOT the VRAM. That's very important to remember. If you get two cards, they don't even have to be the same for Iray. So there are plenty of cases where having two cheaper cards can be better than a single super expensive card. Two 1070's should smash a single 1080, and they have the same VRAM capacity, so that's not a bad idea. But that's also a near $900 investment give or take. Of course, you could get a single card now and buy another later.

  • CypherFOXCypherFOX Posts: 3,401

    Greetings,

    For comparison, I had a GTX 740 with 4GB of memory.  It ranged between ~2-3x faster than my iMac's i7 2.6GHz CPU-only renders depending on various aspects.

    I bought a GTX 1080 'Founders Edition', which just means the reference implementation.  Doing a sample render I'd _just_ done with the 740 on the same version of DAZ Studio, it was more than *20 times* faster.  (7 hours 49 minutes on the 740 GTX vs. 20 minutes 1080.)

    So for me, the 1080 is ~40-60x CPU rendering speeds.  For me, that's completely worth the ~$700 I spent on the card, and the $80 I spent on a 750W power supply upgrade.  It's not worth it because I'll make it back; I won't.  It's worth it because if renders are that fast, I may actually do more of them, which means I'll use more of the ~7,000 products I've bought...and that's worth a great deal to me.

    --  Morgan

     

  • TheKDTheKD Posts: 2,711

    I would go with on 1070, 1080 if you could afford it, but 1070 is a lot of power and VRAM for the buck. 1060 would work too, I have VRAM issues a lot with 960 4gb VRAM, I have to be careful about going over VRAM limit, which is why I like 8gb better than 6gb. I heard you can find good deals on used 9** series, but I don't buy used hardware ever, and don't buy new hardware without a replacement plan in case of early failure.

  • RRedRRed Posts: 18

    I was in a simlair boat not long ago. You may find this chart useful as it lists the cuda cores and clocks of each card, you can then times the cuda cores by the clock speed to give you and idea of the real speed it can put out;

    https://www.studio1productions.com/Articles/NVidia-GPU-Chart.htm

    Eg

    970 = 1644 cores  x 1050 mhz = 1726200

    780ti = 2880 cores x 875hz = 2520000

    1070 = 1920 corse x 1506 MHz = 2891520

    For me I went with a 780ti as they are still beastie and much cheaper compared to 1070 in my country ($240 vs $700). The only major drawback with old cards is the vram which can limit scence sizes as they are 3gb max.

  • nDelphinDelphi Posts: 1,920

    I would recommend that no one get anything with less than 6 GBs of VRAM, and even then, if this will be you only card, the software that is running and Windows can take up to 900 MBs of VRAM. Of course, this depends what you do with it, but for the majority this should be the starting point.

Sign In or Register to comment.