Which CPU is better for a dedicated DAZ PC?
dennis.d.t2972686
Posts: 81
Hi All,
Trying to decide between an i7-6700K 8M Skylake Quad-Core 4.0 GHz and i7-6800K Broadwell-E 6-Core 3.4 GHz. All rendering will be done with GTX 1070.
Top priority is to reduce viewport lag when working on a scene.
Given that this is for a dedicated rendering PC, I would think that the 4.0 GHz quad-core would be faster. Thoughts?
Post edited by dennis.d.t2972686 on
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Comments
How much RAM, if your scene is large and you don't have a lot of RAM it can be real slow navigating around the scene.
If your goal is to reduce viewport lag when working on a scene (I assume using the Iray viewport...), then I'm not sure the choice of CPU's will have much relevance.
First thing you should do is make sure your Studio settings are optimized. I've found the following to work really well:
I have a Ryzen 7 1700 CPU with 16 threads, and manipulating the viewport has little effect on CPU utilization. I think your GPU will make the most difference. And as Scorpio mentioned, make sure you have enough system RAM. I'm not certain that has a direct effect on viewport manipulation, but as soon as you select Iray viewport it will load all the scene resources and might require a ton of RAM.
I'm building a DAZ PC. I'm not really trying to fix anything on my current PC. My current PC is 7 years old with 12GB of RAM (max amount)... Since I have to make a decision as to whether go with an OC'd quad core or a non-OC'd six core i7, I figured I'd ask for suggestions as to which one is better for DAZ purposes.
Clock speed is, to me, a bit of a misdirection; I would look at number of cores and how much memory could be used on the motherboard used, since there are features that would benefit as much from the additional threading of two additional cores as from faster ones.
Are you talking about L2/L3 cache on the CPU?
My point is that DAZ Studio doesn't really care too much how powerful your CPU is if you're using Iray rendering. It cares more about how much RAM you have, how powerful your GPU is, and whether you've applied the settings I referenced, which you should do no matter what PC you have. You mentioned your goal is quick response in the viewport, so no matter what PC you have you should apply those settings.
You might want to consider if you're using other software that cares more about your CPU, and can use multithreaded CPU's, or performs much better with higher clock speed. But DAZ Studio probably isn't the software to use to determine what CPU to get. Like I said, I have an 8 core, 16 thread CPU, and DAZ doesn't really care about any of that, since it never uses all those threads. What does use my CPU is some video editing software, but a lot of software nowadays is going to GPU's.
If it was me, I'd buy more RAM and a better video card and save some money on the CPU.
thanks!
...it does matter if you are doing CPU rendering or have a low memory GPU card that causes Iray to dump to CPU mode more than just occasionally.
OP is rendering with a 1070, so the title is misleading. As ebergerly said, the CPU doesn't really matter if you're rendering with a 1070. If you're going CPU only, then something like a Threadripper 1950x would probably be the way to go as you can put in lots of RAM. A Threadripper will let you put 4 GPUs in your system if you want to go that route. These HEDT builds start to get pricy though.
BTW, I have dual 1080Ti's and still get lag in the viewport. DAZ Studio is buggy as all hell and I've issued several tickets that have been dismissed (except for one).
Yeah, that "lag in the viewport" is something I'm still not clearly understanding. If I apply the settings I referenced above I can usually get almost instantaneous response, or maybe a 1-second delay when manipulating the viewport, even in some heavy scenes. But if I watch my GPU's and CPU's while it's happening it's kinda strange. Some CPU threads start cranking up their utilization, and the GPU's drop off while I'm manipulating the view.
Being a C# programmer, my best guess is that there's a lot of interaction between the GPU and the main application/viewport and the monitor, where the GPU is calculating the render, but has to send lots of data to the monitor via the CPU to get the main application to respond and constantly update the viewport. So I'm guessing that even if you add a bunch of GPU's in parallel, the viewport response might still be bottlenecked by the PCI bus and inability for the software to multithread some of the viewport updating. Or something like that. But that's just a guess.
BTW, I'm curious what you mean by DAZ Studio being "buggy as hell".
For the lag, 1 second is a lot for me. Maybe I'm spoiled. lol Once it starts drawing, it's pretty good though.
As for buggy as hell, there are too many items. Long load times for G3F is a big one. There are more and more threads about this in the DAZ Studio forum. The environment settings are really buggy. Some settings will not render the floor. Some settings will act weird with HDRI. Some settings will cause the cameras to stop casting shadows. If you want specifics, I can go through my tickets and give you a proper rundown. There's a lot there.
Here are items I don't have a ticket for:
dForce is a crash monster.
Selection in the Scene tab still hasn't been fixed in over 10 years now. More annoying than anything, but still.
The geometry and weight tools are very flaky. They'll crash seemingly at random.
There's the snapping morph bug. This is mostly for content creators. When you mess with bones and/or weight maps, you'll often try to change the Bend dial for example and it seems to work while you move the dial. But once you stop, the figure snaps back to its original position. The workaround here is that you must save all your assets, close DAZ Studio and then reload everything. For people new to content creation, especially this area, they will waste a lot of time and work.
Anyways, I could go on, but you get the idea.
Also, an earlier comment says to use the Perspective view as it's faster. This is true most of the time, but in some cases, the opposite is true. If you find the Perspective view slow, try it with an actual camera. It will be much faster. Unfortunately, I forget which Environment mode this is for. In any case, try an actual camera if you notice the Perspective view to be slow.
...a Threadripper 1950x would be nice as long as that patch for W7 actually works. With 128 GB memory it would handle my big scenes with ease. However I could do a build using dual E5 V3 8 2.6 GHz core Xeons (under 100$ each) along with the same amount of memory and come maybe 200$ over the price of just the Threadripper alone for the entire system Yeah wouldn't be as fast as the Threadripper (and I don't overclock anyway) but a major improvement over the 8 threads and 12 GB of memory I have now.
Yeah the "GPU Arms Race" is just getting too crazy (as well as expensive) for my needs.
Kyoto kid, 32GB of RAM is going for something like $450 right now, and you're talking about 128GB?? That's like $1800. You could buy two 1080ti's for that price and have a lot of money to spare.
I really think that for people with super large scenes they should at least think about breaking their scenes up into smaller ones and compositing the results together. I'm starting to figure out a compositing program called Nuke (which is free), and it's a whole lot of fun doing compositing. I'm still trying to figure out the basics, but it's like a whole new hobby. And stuff goes so much faster if you're working with small scenes without much in them. I'm hoping that once I figure it out I'll come up with a nice process to break scenes up in parts but with identical lights and camera positions and stuff, and do some really fast renders and bring the results together in Nuke. And my favorite part is it gets rid of the laggy viewport response since there's not a ton of stuff to calculate. Pretty cool.
Between the rigs I have, I'm going to say the i7 6700K will probably be faster. It has significantly faster single core speed. Not sure though as the video cards aren't identical. My i7 6700K with 1080 Tis starts rendering a little faster than the Threadripper with Titan XPs. But interface does seem slightly smoother on the Threadripper. Also, the memory speed on the 1080 Tis is clocked significantly higher on them, I haven't tuned up the Titans for a better comparison.
What else will you do with it? If it's gaming, I'd go the 6700K. If it's other 3D app and workstation use that will use threads then I would go 6800K.
Kyoto Kid has also said in other threads where this has come up that she uses a lot of off-camera elements that will be seen in the image, and it's much harder to do that correctly in a composting program.
...That's for the current generation of DDR4 I'm looking at DDR3 1333 ECC 4 channel memory kits which I can get for about 500$ - 600$. As I mentioned I used to paint in epic fashion, that is my "artistic MO". Not into portraits or simple vignettes. If I'm doing a gritty "cyber apocalypse" city scene, it better look trashed and gritty and not like you could eat off the street or breathe the air without a filter module. I also render in large resolution format for my big scenes which requires more memory than even a Titan Xp or Quadro P5000 can offer.
As I mentioned I also work in Carrara which does not natively support GPU rendering (far superior to Daz for creating expansive environments) and that is a deciding factor in the build.
A Threadripper 1950X, 32 GB of DDR4 (I'd opt for at least 64), and a single 1080 Ti would be about 2,200$ (without drives, MB, PSU, and case). Pricing the two primary components, CPUs and Memory, for my build (with smaller GPU like a 1050 Ti just to drive the displays) and together they come out around 1,000$ less (the dual 8 core E5 V2 2.6 GHz Xeons run me around 200$ - 220$ total). Yeah it's "old school" tech but for my purposes still very viable (and I can keep running under W7 Pro).