System setup for Daz Iray Renders
angiearland
Posts: 5
Hi, I'm looking into building a PC to create fast, high quality Iray renders. My old iMac is struggling!
So far, this is my shopping list/ideas and would like anyone who has a similar system or experience with these components to tell me if I'm on the right track or not. I am by no means, an expert on the subject and had a friend help me put this list together. I'd appreciate any feedback.
Asus ROG crosshair VI Hero AM4 motherboard
WD Blue SSD
AMD Ryzen 7 2700x 8 Core 16mg Cache
Noctua nh-d15 cooling fans
Power pack 1000-1500 watt EVGA
Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 ti
OR
ASUS GTX Strix 1080ti 8g x 2
DDR4 32 gig RAM x 2
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Comments
can you still get 1080Ti cards? From what I undrstand the PSU is perhaps a little OTT.
HI,
I´m playing with DAZ on
Processor: Ryzen 7 1700
Motherboard: MSI X370 XPOWER GAMING TITANIUM
RAM: 32 Gig DDR4 (2x16gig)
Storage: Samsung 960 EVO 500GB SSD on M.2 for Operating System and Applications
some 4TB HDDs for Daz Library and all the other stuff
Graphics: 2x Gainward Phoenix GS 980ti
Powerpack : 1000 watt BeQuiet
Case: BeQuiet Dark Base 900
Its a very silent setup only using the build in fans from the case and the default ryzen 7 fan (even while rendering),
I´m able to work with the viewport set to nvivia preview "almost" in realtime (when moving the camera it gets some bigger pixels but is fast back to "normal" )
Things I´d change ( if I could afford them right now ) :
doubble the RAM to 4x 16gig
exchange the gtx980tis to a pair of cards with more VRAM
get a second M.2 SSD with at least 2TB for the DAZ Library (checking my Library I think I´d need a 4TB)
Lots of 1080ti on eBay, both used and new.
HoMart,
How are you finding the M.2 SSD? I'm looking at replacing my 5 y.o. Samsung 840 with the Evo 970. I'm wondering if I'll see any speed increase.
I also have 2 Velociraptor 10,000 rpm HDDs for backup, and I may replace 1 of them with 2 Evo 860s. But I'm slightly cagey about relying completely on SSDs, (which is why I'd get two 360s - double-double backup).
Is anyone out there using nothing but SSDs?
I have been looking for a 1080ti I could afford for awhile now also, but personally I would not purchase one from ebay or a used one.
That's your choice. But I did buy from eBay, every single time. For the past 10+ years every GPU I have bought has been from eBay. I bought two 1080ti's last year at different times from different people. There is not really any good reason IMO to go out of your way just to avoid a used card. You can save a lot of money and most manufacturer warranties transfer. Pretty much every 1080ti is still under warranty as I write this (though launch models are getting close to the end of it). EVGA will honor their warranty, regardless of who owns it and how the card was used. But I have never had an issue.
Most people forget about tax, paying tax on new cards is another fee that adds up. I got free shipping and paid no tax, which has saved me hundreds of dollars beyond the just the sale price of the cards.
So while you are searching for a brand new 1080ti, I am already happily plugging away with mine. 1080ti's are officially out of stock, so any you do find are going to be stragglers from boutique sellers, and they will be marked way up because they are the last of their kind. I'm surprised you can find any at all.
That last statement holds true for most Pascal cards now. The 1080ti, 1080, 1070ti, and 1070 are all officially out of stock in most places, and as such are getting marked up, not down, because they are the last new cards of their kind. But on ebay prices are falling, because there are tons of Pascal cards out there. Although prices on 1080ti's are still higher than what I paid for either of mine.
Are there bad ebay sellers? Sure...just don't buy from them, LOL. Never buy from people who only post stock images. Never buy from China, or over seas in general. Stick to sellers in your own country...unless you are in China, then I guess you may indeed be screwed. And don't be afraid to ask the seller questions.
@Maclean
I´m happy with the M.2 SSD, booting is fast as hell ;)
was a little concerned because of the livetime of it, I was told that it is 400TB total bytes written.
I bought it 13 month ago and the SSD tool tells that it has 19.1TB total bytes written right now (I´m using this rig every day) personal data (pictures,documents etc. ) are on the other drives.
To be save I do a backup to a NAS with classic HDD.
I'm currently using Ryzen 2400G + a Nvidia 1080 Ti here, with 32GB (2 16 GB sticks) of DDR4 3200 CL14. Pretty happy with the combo actually. The 2400G drives my monitor and most of the system stuff, while the 1080Ti is there pretty much just for Daz Studio, If I was an avid gamer, I'd probably use the 1080 Ti to game, but the games I play when waiting on renders, etc. are primarily turn based or just generally older games, or card games, so FPS is not a concern for me. The integrated Vega 11 graphics are more than up to the task in my case.
I'm not sure, but it's possible that my setup (using the AMD APU for system stuff) may have actually liberated the 1080Ti from the 18% Windows 10 VRAM tax... I've seen the full 11 GB reported in the Daz log a few times now, where I used to see 6.4 GB for the 8 GB 1080s I was using before. I'll report back at some point once I feel like I have confirmation one way or the other.
I'm curious to see if we'll get an 8 Core/16 thread Ryzen with an APU as the 7nm CPUs become available, and I'd imagine an extra 4 cores/8 threads might be helpful to Daz, even though I primarily size my scenes so that they can render on the GPU as much as possible.
@HoMart,
Thanks for that info. Sounds like it'll be fine for me.
There are tons of new GTX cards for sale at newegg, so they're obviously not out of stock. But yes, some are insanely expensive. Like $1,300+ for a 1080ti. A 1060 is 200+, and a 1080 is 800+.
To the OP:
As Richard said, your power supply is WAY oversized. Even if you're willing to spend $2,600 on two 1080ti's, their total power draw is only max of 500watts. And they're likely to be, by far, the most power draw in your computer.
I've looked at some of the 1080 options, and now I'm looking at the GeForce 1660 ti which was just released - the Asus dual-fan 6Gb version. It's probably all I need, since I don't render huge scenes, but the specs are pretty good. I'm moving up from a GTX 970, and the 1660 ti seems to be comparable to the 1070.
Thank you for all the info, there's some useful tips in there. I know there is an upgraded version to the graphics card I listed but it doesn't have as many ports. I'm rendering scifi scenes and may be doing more people in the near future. ATM I just can't seem to get them looking natural and not like plastic dolls.
Just a note that, if budget becomes a concern, the GTX 1070 cards are definitely worth a look. Sure, they are slower than the 1080s, but they still have 8GB of VRAM, which is important if you like to set up more complex scenes. And they are cheaper than the 1080s.
That being said, yeah if you can swing a 1080 Ti for a reasonable price, you won't regret it. At least until more affordable large GB options (say the 24 GB Nvidia card that is currently over $2000) become available. The 2080 Ti is faster of course, but Daz Studio still needs to catch up to the 20xx series. The beta version is there, not so much the release version unless something changed in the last month or so. Also, not sure if the reliability issues that were reported for the first batch of 2080 Tis have been ironed out. A handful of people had issues shortly after the launch of that card.
I'd probably not buy a used one as you never know if it's been used for crypto mining. I saw one who sold a 1080ti for a low price, I checked him out and discovered that he sold several, but each one on a separate page, instead of all on one page, as you usually do. So that was probably a miner trying to hide what the cards had been used for.
But I dont see any problems with a new one. With the eBay money back guarantee you should be reasonable safe - if the product isn't as advertised (e.g. used if claimed new), you can cancel the deal. And normally it's fairly easy to see if a product isn't new.
There can be a problem with warranty though - with some companies, like MSI, the warranty period begins at production date, instead of purchase date. Which means even a new card may have maybe only 1 year of warranty left, instead of the regular 3 (though I guess that is irrelevant with eBay purchases of course).
That's a solid amount of system RAM. And a RTX2080 isn't any better than a 1080ti for rendering in DS. I went for a 2080 because once NVIDIA updates Iray and gets those now-useless CUDA cores buzz'n, I'll be rendering 20 minute scenes in 2 minutes flat....... or so the story goes.
There's some other threads here that address the "Windows 10 VRAM tax", and yes, you can get 10+ GB of VRAM usage on your 1080ti. In fact Windows 10 only limits INDIVIDUAL PROCESSES to take no more than 90% of the GPU VRAM resources. The purpose is to make sure no one process/application gets greedy and sucks up all the hardware resources, which is one of the core functions of any OS. But you can still utilize virtually all the GPU VRAM across multiple processes. Which means if you're doing a long render and want to play a video game while you wait, W10 makes sure there's some leftover GPU VRAM for the video game.
In fact, I've written a simple C++ application that shows that my one application can start multiple processes and access the entire VRAM. If Iray did the same it could also access the entire VRAM.
So no, Windows 10 doesn't get greedy and needlessly grab a bunch of VRAM for its own nefarious purposes. It keeps others from needlessly grabbing VRAM. And keep in mind when you're rendering there are probably other processes also using the VRAM, so if you want to see how much VRAM your Iray is actually using you need to check the GPU info in Task Manager, where it separates out VRAM usage by process.