After using iray for the last few years, I now prefer 3Delight... PC build recommendations wanted
FrankTheTank
Posts: 1,481
So a few years ago, I started off with 3Delight, but then iray was just taking off, and so I quickly bailed on 3Delight and jumped onto the iray bandwagon. I used iray for a few years, but then got away from 3D/Daz for a year or so for different reasons..., but now getting back into 3D/DS and because of my current (weak and old) laptop situation, I've been forced to render in OpenGL and 3Delight. So maybe for the first time, I've started playing around with 3Delight in a serious manner. And I discovered that for the type of renders I do, (non-photorealistic, animations) I'm really, really liking 3Delight. I don't know if Daz changed the 3Delight engine since I used it last, but I find it really easy to use and I love how it looks. I also have all the content I could ever need, so I'm not really worried about being left out in the cold by iray.
So now instead of building a PC primarily aimed at doing iray renders, I want to build a PC desktop for primarily 3Delight performance. Also not sure it is possible to use dforce with 3Delight, I think dforce benefits from the GPU, not sure though, all I know is I haven't had any luck yet getting dforce to work on this laptop, but I think that is just because this laptop is too underpowered.
In any case, the meat of the issue is: what is the best processor/build for 3Delight performance (while also hoping to use dforce as well)? Can it use as many cores/threads as you can throw at it? Or is it limited in some way where it would be overkill? Should I just get the best processor rated for video editing performance, like the AMD Ryzen 9 3900X 12-core, 24-Thread Unlocked Desktop Processor? Also how much RAM should I get? Obviously enough to hold any scenes, but I'm thinking the memory requirements are not as high as for iray, since I've heard you should have double the system RAM for Iray. Not sure if this is true. Would like some expert opinions if possible. Is 32GB plenty? Can I even get away with 16GB?
I don't care if its AMD or intel for CPU, but I am reading the AMDs are beating intel right now for price/performance. Also I would prefer if there was a build that could still use Windows 7 Pro, I don't care about security updates, I will keep the desktop I build offline and it will be for rendering only. I love Windows 7 and would use it forever if I could. Obviously this is probably a pipe dream, so I will go to windows 10 begrudgingly if need be for best perforance. (I would learn linux if Daz ever works off the shelf with Linux)
Looking to get the most bang for the buck. Currently on this laptop (i5-4260 1.4Ghz, 4GB RAM) I'm rendering a frame of 3Delight animation at around a minute each, which is surprisingly fast, so I can only imagine how fast a high end processor can render 3Delight, I'm thinking it could be as fast as 5-10 seconds a frame with a CPU with 3 times as many cores and 3 times the clock speed.
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Comments
Yes, 3delight has always scaled very well with processor cores/speed, though I haven't seen any proper benchmarks with the recent CPUs. I'm certainly hoping that the Ryzen in my new system will do well for 3delight, and have no reason to think it won't.
dForce uses OpenCL rather than CUDA, so it will take advantage of both nVidia and AMD GPUs - indeed, i've been told that AMD tends to have a slightly better OpenCL implementation though if that's true I don't know what impact it would have on dForce.
I have a ryzen 2600x, it's a beast compared to my i5 7500. One thing I will say though, get a noctua cooler at least. The beasts run hot fast, unless you plan on downthrottiling, but that seems kinda dumb to me. Why pay for a beast of a CPU, then run it gimped right? The stock cooler, even with some top notch thermal paste applied was still getting up near 100C, made me really nervous. I haven't seen it hit above 65 with my noctua, even in august, and the house has no A/C. Get as much RAM as you can afford, no such thing as too much.
https://ca.pcpartpicker.com/
I use that site every time I build, hasn't steared me wrong yet. Click on the flag to select your country, unless you are in canada too lol.
...I would say a minimum of 16 GB for memory ideally though I'd go for 32 if you can afford it.
Indeed, AMD gives you more cores/threads and core speed for the buck than Intel. Unfortunately the Zen architecture doesn't support older versions of the Windows OS other than W10. The same goes for any new Intel CPUs code named Kaby Lake or newer. My one concern is the number of memory channels supported by the Ryzen series. The Threadripper series offers double the the memory channels (4) and close to the same clock performance. Granted the R9 3900X is 7nm while the second generation Threadrippers are still 12nm. Not sure what difference that makes for rendering whereas multi channel memory does have an impact.
As I build my own systems, For a 3DL render box, I considered an older dual socket workstation/server board running two 8 core/16 thread Xeons and 64 GB of memory to start (upgrading to 128 later as I do fairly "epic" level scenes) which would run on W7 Pro.
If you are moving back to 3DL I would suggest looking into Wowie's AweSurface Shader Kit (available in the store here). It opens up a lot more of what 3DL is capable of to the point of approaching near photo real results.
https://www.daz3d.com/aweshading-kit-10-for-daz-studio
Here ia a link to a thread that has a images rendered in 3DL with the AweSurface shaders
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/284366/the-official-awesurface-test-track/p37
While it's a bit o fa learning curve it can get some very realistic results.
To the best of my knowledge 3DL uses every available thread but I haven't seen that anyone has tried 3DL on a dual CPU 7742. But that's a $25k rig (roughly).
Depending on budget and other needs you have lots of options. The 3900X is a great processor the benchmarks in things like Blender are very impressive. The 3950X is coming out in two weeks, the 16 core/32 thread CPU in the Ryzen 3000 line. The Threadripper 3000 chips also launch in 2 weeks, 24c and 32c CPU's.. The top of the TR 3k lineup is expected to launch early next year and that appears to be a 7742 with fewer memory channels (64core/128 threads!) but it will likely cost $3k or more.
For memory you want as much as you can afford. I'd consider 16G as the bare minimum for any Windows machine. Also if you're buying Ryzen you want reasonably fast memory. I'd aim for 3200 speed. Unless you really have money to burn don't bother going past 3600. If you go TR you should aim for 4 sticks of RAM no matter how much RAM per stick as the TR chips are quad channel and it will perform better that way.
BTW I just ran a quick check of one of my VN scenes rendered in 3DL on my R7 2700. I didn't manually adjust any materials so it looked awful but the render finished in 24 seconds. Ryzen 3000 is something like 15 to 25% faster than Ryzen 2000 so that should give you an idea of what sort of performance you should get.
You must be overclocking that chip pretty heavily or have a defective box cooler. I've built several systems on the 2600 and they could even be moderately OC'd on the box cooler.
I do like the Noctua tower coolers, the NH-Ux ones, but unless you're overclocking those seem way too much for the 2600. If the box cooler wasn't enough I'd just go with the old standby CM Hyper 212.
I don't OC other than turning on the factory OC feature, forget what it is called. I got the x so I didn't have to deal with manually tuning in an OC. Iray gets hotter than even cinebench lol.
There is no way a non OC 2600X should be thermal throttling, or nearly, on the box cooler. Does the case have actual airflow? What's your room ambient?
BTW the 3950X reviews just dropped and it looks amazing for 3DL.
Yeah, unfortunately the renders are not very artistic, mostly testing and bugtracking
. There's definitely a learning curve, but that's also the case with IRay. The main difference is there are no one click presets for aweSurface, you need to figure it all out by yourself, while the store is filled with IRay shaderpresets add ons and whatnot.
Yes I also get down to around a minute/frame, sometimes 30 sec for less complex stuff, without dumbing it down too much. I'm on a 2015 IMac with 8 GB RAM...for stills I do pathtracing and have a hard time getting under 10 min for a full HD render. Still about 5 times faster than IRay, but I'm having wet dreams about the newest high end stuff=))
...true, but the results I've seen are still approaching a highly realistic quality unlike the generic 3DL, without needing an expensive high VRAM GPU card. True also that the tradeoff is the learning curve but I find the would results far more satisfying sort of like when I still painted in oils, or did highly detailed pencil drawing, there were no"presets."
Interesting, now the question is it worth the extra $300? Or it it better to try to get a good deal on the 3900? I'm gonna have to probably wait until the New Year to make the splurge and start building. So I'm gonna watch and see.
And coming from the intel camp, I'm used to having a basic integrated graphics card. What is a good moderate GPU to pair with an AMD? It's something I overlooked as I i wasn't thinking I needed one. I don't want to spend much on that if I don't need to, as I'm not a gamer.
And if I do decide to go back to iray at a later date then I would go big and get a 2080ti or whatever the current good card is at that point. But for now I just want something that will handle playing around with dforce and 3DL, video editing, photoshop.