Is AMD Threadripper best for DAZ/modeling
jchall88
Posts: 0
I am looking at building a new PC soon, now that I got some extra cash from my tax return. I do PC gaming but have recently been having alot of fun with DAZ, although my current computer struggles to render and model to be honest. From everything I have read AMD's threadripper is ideal for this stuff, but before I drop the large amount of money for this I wanted this forums opinion on it. If building a new PC should I be looking at the Threadripper? This (https://pcpartpicker.com/list/) is largely what I plan to build, if anyone has better advice please let me know.
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Comments
For me, Yes.
But everyone is different; I use a 1950x.
Depending on what you do, you may get more value out of sinking more into graphics cards, although I would wait and see what Nvidia's new offerings are.
I would also consider if you're happy using IRAY or would prefer to use one of the many alternatives, some which don't tie you to one vendor.
The 1950x certainly helps when rendering on CPU. Will that change with new technologies that Nvidia introduces in their new line of cards? Well, that is part of the reason I say wait and see.
I've held off purchasing 10 series cards; one Windows steals RAM; two it is a lot to spend and have the card sitting idle, unless use an alternative to Iray. 3 - the jumped relatively recently in cost.
I wouldn't say absolute best, but it probably is the best bang for the buck. The best high end desktop processor goes to the i9-7980xe, but of course those are $1800 processors (18 cores though), vs $950 or less for a 16 core Threadripper. Also, Threadripper has more PCIe lanes (64 vs 44 for the i9), although running graphics cards at x8 isn't really significantly slower than x16 (3% maybe). The bigger challenge (if you wanted to max out the PCIe at x8 with say 6 graphics cards and some storage) would be to find the best motherboard to stuff a lot of graphics cards into, should you be wanting to do that someday...
Really, though, 4 graphics cards is more than plenty, unless you are splitting them into two groups (alternating renders between two sets)... Of course, all of this only applies if you are using Iray. 3Delight, yeah more cores is better - 16 cores good!
But that's planning for the future. Yeah, Threadripper is a great place to start, and is very competitive. If you can hold off until say July/August, however the 12 nm Threadrippers are due to land then. The 12nm Ryzens are out, and have about a 10% performance uplift over the 1st gen Ryzens. You can expect the 12nm Threadrippers to have a similar uplift... but if you need to upgrade before then, yeah there's no shame whatsoever going with 1st generation Threadripper.
There's a forum thread where some people have been documenting their Threadripper experiences, here:
https://direct.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/192511/has-anyone-here-bought-a-treadripper-rig-and-used-it-for-studio-yet/p9
Thanks. My current build cannot really handle rendering well without taking hours, so I am excited about builiding a new one for rendering in IRAY. I might try and take your advice and start with the GPU first and see if that helps with the rendering, although given that it is over 8 years old, I think that 3rd gen i7 is likely causing alot of bottleknecking
I have been looking around trying to find out when the next generation of the 1950X was comming out but couldnt find a good estimate so I appreciate the July/August timeline. I appreciate the link for the Threadripper discussion. I am new to rendering and havent built a custom rig in quite awhile, so I want to make sure I am not off track for my plans. Thanks for the help, I will go take a look at that thread now.
Yeah, as long as you have a PCIe 16 slot, you SHOULD be able to run a newer card, but of course there are some caveats there (finding drivers, etc.). The Cuda core based GPU is the most important thing for Iray renders, assuming they will fit in the graphics memory..
I'm reasonably sure that we will see some Threadripper noise around end of May/June (that's when we saw it last year end of May/June), but retail availability didn't really kick in until the July/August timeframe. Things could get rolling earlier this year of course, but that's what I've seen mentioned in a few random places.
Just FYI, your link doesn't go anywhere, it's literally a link to a /list/
What is current build? Maybe you have some upgrade options you aren't aware of.
CPUs can help, but the biggest factor is GPU. It depends on what your plans are. Are you going to run multiple GPUs, or just one? This is a vital question. For single GPU use, the CPU is not as important. It can help, but this expense is better served buying the best GPU you can.
Take a look at the this benchmark thread. You can test you current machine to see how it stacks up against 3 years worth of benches. I made my own 2018 bench scene near the end, but if your machine is old, stick to the original bench.
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/53771/iray-starter-scene-post-your-benchmarks/p1
You can compare your marks to other builds posted there and get an idea of just what that kind of hardware can do for you. Threadrippers have some marks as well.
There are people who have jammed 1070's into decade old desktops and they can get bench numbers that match brand new desktops with 1070s. So this is very strong evidence that for single GPU in Iray, it just doesn't matter that much what you have unless you go to some serious extremes (threadripper might be one such extreme.) Obviously, as a gamer, you do want a CPU that wont bottleneck your GPU too much, but for Iray it isn't a big problem. One advantage though is using CPU+GPU, which could be faster. Still, if your budget is tight, then upgrading your GPU in your current machine can work, because otherwise you'd need to build an entire machine from scratch, and that would be much more expensive.
BUT if you wish to do multiple GPUs, then your CPU starts to factor in a lot more. The more cores the better. There is clear evidence that more CPU cores can make multi-GPU renders faster, even when not using the CPU to render.
If money is not an issue, then you go hog wild. Iray will eat up everything you throw at it.
And the march of technology keeps going, AMD just released new Ryzen CPUs this week, which are benching much better at games (something Ryzen 2017 was lacking at.) They go up to 8 cores/16 threads, but the gaming performance is very strong. Ryzen was already very strong for everything else, so now that gaming is brought in line, these look to be fantastic all around chips. Plus Nvidia is set to release new GPUs sometime this year, so it may pay to wait a little while if you can. Even if you don't by one of these, the previous generation should see a price drop. (And man do we need a price drop.)
I'll add one extremely important note here: It will -probably- take some time for Daz Iray to support the newest GPU release. It took several MONTHS for Daz to get Pascal support, which was a massive bummer to people who bought Pascal cards at launch expecting to use them for Daz. There are also people who bought the $3000 Titan V...but they can't use it for Daz Iray yet! Oh snap! We can hope that Iray will be supported faster this time, but there is no way to know for sure. So this may be another factor in your purchase decision.