Technical discussion about CUDA , GPU's and Daz3D
ggrancharov
Posts: 39
Hi,
After 8.1 came out it's finally time to retire my belowed MacPro workhorse running on HS with a 11G Titan X.
I need to come come up with a "beast" for work related stuff. This machine will be rendering non-stop. Obviously I've looked at current prices, but I hope someone running a "beast" can share some light to my questions:
My current old Titan X has 12GB of Ram and 3072 CUDA cores. A 1080Ti has about the same CUDA cores. A 2080Ti which is about twice the price of a 1080TI has just an 22% increate over the 1080Ti in CUDA cores. E.g. getting two 1080Ti's for the price of one 2080Ti would give me more performance. I could of course get 4 Titan X (used) for the price of one 2080Ti giving me a total of 12k CUDA cores and 48GB memory.
In other words, is it even worth it to look at the newer cards when supposedly Daz3d is "just" making use of CUDA cores? Or are there other factors that I don't consider?
I am looking to spend roughly $4-5k, any advice would be hghly appreciated.
Cheers,
George
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Comments
The number of Cuda Cores is not the only factor for faster renders. Also the architecture and the kind of RAM of the GPU.
As example my current systems with "my test scene render":
GTX 1070 Ti (8 GB) - 2432 Cuda Cores - Rendertime slightly over 8 Minutes
RTX 2060 Super (8 GB) - 2176 Cuda Cores - Rendertime slightly over 4 Minutes (as you may recognize with a lower number of Cores)
RTX 3070 (8 GB) - 5888 Cuda Cores - Rendertime 1 Min. 50 Sek.!
One thing to consider... The older 10xx cards are GTX not RTX and DS needs to emulate the missing RTX functions in software, which at least reserves more VRAM than with an RTX card.
Thank you both! basically what I am looking for is more or less at least the same speed I have currently with my (GTX) Titan X, or buying two cards and speed things up x 4 (with 2 cards) compared to my previous setup. The Titan X also has 12GB of ram that gives me a lot of freedom in busy scenes. So many choices!
Then there is windows - looking atprevious daz threads, different windows systems seem to have different problems with different cards. I need something stable, I wouldn't mind if its an older version of windows. I am trying to find threads with complete "fool proof" setups. I am usually rendering long animations, 400-600 frames in 1200x1200. I mostly keep the iterations capped at 1500 and polish things up with AE.
It's a lot of money during "those" times now, so I am just concerned I mess up something.
My current, aging "Fool proof" system is based on Intel X99 chipset, I7-5820K, 64GB RAM and an RTX 2070 Super, running Windows 7 Ultimate. Planning to update the motherboard to X299 and the procesor to I9-10xxx this summer.
In my opinion, building a "Fool proof" system starts with selecting chipset/processor with no integrated GPU's
With the inflated consumer GPU prices combined with the ever increasing memory requirements for new Daz assets... You might want to look into geting Quadro RTX A4000 or A5000 GPUs instead.
$1200 = Quadro RTX A4000 16GB render speed should about the same as the RTX 3070, but with double the VRAM
$2300 = Quadro RTX A5000 24GB render speed should about the same as the RTX 3080, but with more than double the VRAM
Right now these quadro cards go for the same as the lower VRAM consumer card equivilent.
It is also worth to look at a complete system or a laptop. Here (I live in Germany) are good deals for that every week. With RTX 30xx GPU! The Price for a complete PC is sometimes as low as the price for only the GPU (if you get one).
Iray makes use of the new RT cores for raytracing and the Tensor cores for the denoiser, and would have faster OpenCL performance for dForce simulation.
The major architecture changes in each generation of GPU results in big improvements in the CUDA performance.
Like Joe2018, I could only get hold of an (in stock and reasonably priced) RTX3060 by getting a pre-built system!
The current rankings in the benchmark thread are:
Thanks all for your answers. Full i7 setups with 3060's and medium range extras are being sold for roughly $1,5k, e.g. I could take two of those eventually. How are the ratings above calculated? That would basically mean that the 3060 will render 4x faster than my Titan X and only 50% slower than a 3090. Is my math right? That sounds too good to be true.
Given that both the oldest Titan X and the RTX 3060 have roughly the same CUDA cores, but the 3060 renders 4x faster - I had no idea the new architecture makes such a big difference - can someone confirm that? I am just an artist, not technical at all.
Also, would going with an i7 be foolproof for the next few years or is a i9 a must?
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/341041/daz-studio-iray-rendering-hardware-benchmarking/p1 ;
Thanks to RayDAnt's hard work we have an Iray/Raytracing specific benchmark, instead of the general 'gaming' benchmarks in most reviews.
Those ratings are actually the 'Iterations per second' extracted from DAZ Studio's log file.
Three years (Titan RTX, 2018) is a long time in computing!
As well as a new CUDA architecture there is the second generation of RT cores, the shrinking from 12nm to 8nm, change up to PCIe4, a newer Optix library...etc. etc.
All resulting in a basic 3060 matching the Titan RTX in performance... and for 100 Watts less power!
PerttiA , that thread doesn't list the 3060.
So after browsing around a bit more I tend to go with a dual-3060 (12 + 12 GB) setup which should be equivalet to one 3080 but with 2GB more memory for scenes for more or less the same price. Now I just have to figure out the rest of the system
System RAM should be your next priority. The general reccomendation is to have at least double the size of your GPU VRAM.
Get at least 32GB of RAM
The number of CPU cores are not as important because most of the taks in Daz Studio are sungle threaded. Clock speed will get you a bigger boost. There is no need for a high core count Core i9, Xeon, Ryzen 9, Threadtipper, or Epyc CPU, unless you are running other applications that are hevilly multithreadded.
Get a high clock speed current generation Core i5/i7 or Ryzen 5/7
I think the first 3060 results start on page 19 or 20 of that thread.