graphics card
onefromb5b4
Posts: 26
in The Commons
I am going to be updating my system in the near futire. what I have now is this
processor - AMD fx4100
ram - 8gb
1tb hdd
Grafix - Nvidia gt520
Looking at going with AMD Ryzen 5 3600 but im torn between Nvidia GTX 1660 8gb or Radeon RX590 8gb - research says rx590 outperforms the 1660 but then I can't use IRAY rendering......
I dont really play games on the system but DAZ is a big part of my system.
Any suggestions or input is helpful.
Thanks.
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It depends on whether you want to use iray for your renders. If you are happy with 3Delight then either graphics card will be fine. But, if you want to use iray thne you need a nVidia card because iray rendering on a cpu is painfully slow.
My recommendation would be to go for the GTX 1660, but are you sure it is 8GB and not 6GB? All the ones I can see are 6GB.
Yes it is a 6GB 1660
I have the MSI Nvidia GTX 1660, I'm not unhappy with it. It does IRay very nicely. But is limited to one or two scantilly clothed characters plus simple environment. My CPU is an Intel i5-8600 (6 cores) so even the 3Delight or off-loaded IRay renderings proceeds tolerably quickly. I also have 32GB RAM so I'm not limited by s/w rendering space. I can see that complex scenes with many characters, clothes and complex environment would be a problem and have to be done in layers. But that's not how I work, yet.
for under $100 more you could get an RTX 2060. A lot more powerful than the 1660. You might find a deal on the RTX series.
I would skimp on pretty much every component to get at least a 2060 Super, or if really budget constrained the EVGA 2060 KO (which not only should be among the cheapest 2060's it is also the best render card of the 2060's).
People buying graphics cards right now need to make peace with themselves in advance should the next era of graphics cards get released by June.
For sure it may not happen until September. And it may be a flop like 20 series and not really offer much extra value for money (initially). But my personal guess is it will be a revolution the size of 970 1070 and 1080ti releases again.
GTC is the end of March and so far Nvidia has not announced a big press event, which is what they'd do if they were going to announce Ampere officially. If it isn't announced at GTC it seems extremely unlikely to be announced before June. They could announce at Computex the first week of June but they normally announce new microarchitectures at graphics specific events. That would push any announcment back to late summer, which is when they announced Turing, and Gamescon. If that follows the Turing model it would be a further 9 months before consumer cards get to market.
This is the first important part, and the second important part is Dim Reaper's question: whether you render in Iray or 3Delight.
I came from Iray rendering on CPU to doing so on GPU, and the benefits of an Nvidia graphics card are simply amazing. Renders that would take about 7 hours now take as little as 20 minutes. That's more than 20 times faster. Milage for this increase will vary depending on the card you actually get, I moved from an old i5 CPU to an RTX 2070. If I had picked an RTX 2060, my renders would've been roughly 17 times faster than on my CPU. On a 1660, I would've seen an improvement of roughly 14 times. The most interesting option is the currently the RTX2060 Super, which really is nearly as good as the 2070. It's the best iRay rendering performance per dollar card at the moment, and it's mid-price in the whole RTX line-up.
The quality of my new CPU had just a minor effect on all this. So simply put, for Iray, you can somewhat skimp on the CPU, though you'll probably still want to improve it, but the difference between a 2600 and a 3600 is neglectable for Daz Studio, freeing up some funds towards a better graphics card.
Do look through the Iray Rendering Benchmark post, the table can be a little bit overwhelming at first glance, but, basically, try to compare how the cards compare per column. As drivers and Daz Studio versions get updated, new columns will appear, and not every card has been tested on every version, so finding cards within a single column helps identifying how they relate to one another, allowing you to roughly extrapolate how one performs in case a number is missing.
In case you do 3Delight renders instead of Iray renders, then how does this affect you? Well, for 3Delight renders, you'd obviously benefit more from a better CPU instead of a better card, but do consider all those products you've had over time that didn't come with 3Delight materials. How much time did you spend adjusting Iray materials to 3Delight materials? That amount of time will be reduced a lot when you can simply switch to Iray, though you might have some older scenes and assets now that you have to change from 3Delight to Iray instead. Sometimes, that involves a lot of tweaking lights and textures (most notoriously, some assets may suddenly have emissive surfaces when they shouldn't, and transparent surfaces will generally need tweaking as well), other times, Daz Studio does it automatically, though that will probably add a few minutes to your render time.
So, Iray or 3Delight really is a big question here. And to some degree, also what other programs you use. You already mentioned you hardly need your card for gaming, but what about Photoshop, video editing software, etcetera. What are the differences in performance between the two cards for other programs you use? Do these differences in performance mount up against the 1400-2000 percent performance increase you'd get for using an Nvidia card for Iray rendering?
I have been using the 3Delight because my vid card is only a GT520 and my pics look VERY grainy. I don't use Photoshop or GIMP or other photo editing software for my art work.
OH I guess I should state that I've been using Vic4....Have not migrated to Vic8, due to my studio library being 750gb in size, although I'm guessing I should migrate to V8. Just wish the clothing were interchangable from V4 to V8.
Riversoft has a couple of utilities to convert v4 clothes and hair to v8, and one to add more controls to clothes you've converted.
I'll have to lookinto that. Thanks.
So are you sticking with 3DL for the long term, or do you have any plans on using Iray? Which one you chose will completely alter your build. Certainly with 3DL, you want a good CPU. Ryzen is fantastic for this, and if you stick with 3DL ONLY then you can just get a cheap GPU to drive the monitor while focusing on buying the best Ryzen you can.
BUT if you want to do Iray, then you want to think about GPUs. Iray sucks on 90% of CPU in existence, you can take the exact opposite approach and focus on Nvidia GPU more than CPU.
You can try for balance, but doing so means that neither one would be fantastic. So you have some real choices to make.
If you are thinking of Iray, you need to pay serious attention to VRAM as much as speed. If you run out of VRAM, the entire scene drops to CPU rendering, where with 3DL, you only need to worry about system RAM which is more plentiful. So VRAM is vital, and considering where GPUs are at right now, you would want to get at least a 8GB something. The 2060 Super has 8GB, and it has some good speed while being the cheapest RTX card with 8GB. I think most people are happy with that. The 1660 or 1660ti lack the RT cores of RTX cards, and those RT are legit. They really do enhance render speed, just look at that bench test that was linked. The 2060 and the 2060 Super, in spite of being the lowest RTX cards, still beat many of the non RTX cards on the list, even cards that cost a whole lot more.
It is certainly possible to convert things from V4 to V8. Some things convert ok, some others are much harder. I honestly cannot say I am a big fan of the Riversoft converter, it has been extremely hit or miss in my experience, with more miss than hit. And just forget shoes, you need to do your own manual method of converting just about any shoe from one to the next if you want to have any hope of it looking correct. Hair is probably the easiest thing, and sometimes you can just simply parent a hair to the G8 head rather than do any conversion at all. The hair converter is much better than the clothing ones, IMO.
One other thing to consider is that if you really are thinking of Iray, you will also want to convert the materials to Iray. Just converting the item to fit Genesis 8 is only step one. Many items need to be optimized for Iray or they will look like plastic in the render. I will say I think it is easier to get something looking decent in Iray than it is for 3DL, at least. Once you have a grasp of what some surface settings do you can get a feel for what works and what doesn't. You could also apply shader presets for things, too. So rather than trying to find a balance to get a metal pipe to look good with its old textures, you could use a preset from one of the many shader sets you can find here and other places instead.
OUTRIDER...I am really considering just staying with 3DL.
In that case you could always buy a GPU later and just not worry about it now. You could build a computer focused on the CPU side. You have that old GPU, which is nothing special, but good enough to drive a monitor. That is the only drawback to Ryzen CPUs, they have no built in GPU for monitor output, so you have to have a GPU on hand. But pretty much anything will do, as long as it is capable enough of running the display and basic apps. So you have options. If you skip the GPU, you save a lot of cash and put that into the CPU side. If sometime later you decide to give Iray another shot, well you could buy a GPU and put it in.
I think later this year will be a good time for GPUs. So I believe waiting on a GPU would pay off regardless. Both AMD and Nvidia are set to release new generations of products, and their competition could pay off for us consumers. Plus, the out going GPUs, like the 2000 series, would almost certainly get cheaper to buy. I feel that current Turing GPUs will be seriously outclassed by next generation's ray tracing ability, and so their prices will drop like a rock, as they will be less desirable. That is just my opinion, but I am not alone in thinking that. That's also why I decided to skip Turing myself. Turing is only the first generation of hardware ray tracing.
I have two titan x nvidia video cards and most of my renders are opengl. So It is up to you what you need and what you want to pay.
You should next CPU upgrade get a 8 core 16 thread AMD CPU and an AMD GPU with 8GB RAM, eg MSI Radeon RX 570 Mk2 8GB OC. The AMD CPU will help a lot with faster CPU rendering of 3DL while the 8GB AMD GPU will not be helpful with DAZ it will be helpful with most everthing else, eg Blender with or without the Radeon ProRender plgin installed. You have to shop around for the best prices though.
nVidia doesn't help if you don't iRay and are serious about not 'iRaying'. If you do iRay, don't be silly buy the nvidia 1660 as the cheapest new available model GPU that does iRay.
I just bought a new system
Ryzen 5 3rd Gen 3600 (3.60GHz), AMD Radeon RX 590 8GB, 16GB DDR4 3000MHz, 512GB SSD
Should be here by March 5.
Sweet!
Happy DAZing!
well that system gave me the BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH 24 hours after using it. Called newegg directly and thry are giving me a refund.... so i got a new new system.
Ryzen 5 3600, nvidia gtx 1660, 8gm mem, 500 sshd
BSoD is not always that big of a deal. It can be very serious and it can also be, reboot and everything is fine.
Probably the AMD StorMI drivers in that last system you returned. My system was frequently bluescreening until I removed those drivers & rebooted.
Blue screens may happen from everything and anything though. My system got them from a faulty memorybank, even though the guy who built the system tested it for hours, so my guess is that the testing maybe strained the memorybank, but that it finally toppeled over only two days after I got the system.
My previous computer occasionally bluescreened from attaching/detaching usb devices. A system I had before that bluescreened because some drivers weren't flawless with Win98SE (as much as I actually liked that Windows version!).
Biggest problem with bluescreens is, that they generally disappear into reboot too fast to grab pen and paper and note down the errorcode, and when you do manage to write it down and look it up, it gives just a crude direction for actually finding the problem.
Knock on wood. I've never had an OS blue-screen on me in the past 20 years, nor any problems with DS/Poser not doing as it should or in fact any major 3D program or GPU problem since I started with 3D back in the 90s.
Just good luck I suppose. Now I've said all that I've probably cursed myself and tomorrow I'll see the blue screen of death at start-up. Should have said nothing.
You're very lucky. Back in 2000 BSoD's were common. I was still coding back then and I got them probably once a day.
My 8 or 9 year old HP system with an ATI graphics card does a BSoD once in a while, reporting graphic card problems. Usually when I'm viewing a busy website with lots of pictures, animations and ads and I flip back & forth from page to page. Not often, but perhaps once every few months. No damage done except the frustration of an unscheduled reboot. Irritating when it happens. I've tried driver updates and even replacing the graphics card a couple times but the system wouldn't recognize the new card, So, I've given up and just live with the problem in that machine but my solution was to buy a new better machine. "THERE, TAKE THAT you old cantakerous machine, you've been obsoleted by a spry youngster!"