Best Graphics card for Iray
gibrril_fa945a6cee
Posts: 544
in The Commons
Hi all,
I was wondering what the best graphics card was to work with Iray. I was planning on buying a Nvidia Titan X card, but it would appear these are no longer sold... I tried to find another Nvidia card with the same specs, but I came up empty... So if any of you know what the best graphics card is to work with Iray, please let me know!
Thanks a lot,
Me
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NVIDIA Titan X Pascal or GTX 1080 are the 'best' options. Purchase the GTX 1080 if your scenes will fit inside 8GB VRAM, if your scenes are routinely larger than what the GTX 1080 can handle the Titan X Pascal with 12GB VRAM would be the card you need.
This is making the assumption that 'best' means fastest.
Thanks for the reply!
What store still sells the Titan X Pascal? I'm based in Europe, but no store I can find sells these...
Thanks a lot,
Me
The Titan X Pascal can be purchased from the NVIDIA store if avaiable in your territory.
...hoping they soon release the Pascal Titan X designt to thrird party vendors, that way maybe prices might drop a bit through competition. 1,200$ is a lot for a single fan air cooled GPU.
If you have 2,500$ burning a hole in your pocket there is the Quadro P5000 with 16 GB GDDR5X.
Speed is a relative thing. I look at from the perspective of will the scene stay in video memory or dump to slower CPU mode. If it does the latter (and does so with some frequency), all the CUDA cores in the world are of no help. ALl you have is whatever your CPU offers (usually 8 threads maybe 12 if you have a 6 core i7).
What's the difference in rendering speed between GTX 1070 and 1080 other things being equal? And is there any difference between the different brands (MSI, gigabyte, Asus etc.)?
It seems to be sold out at nividia.eu. But amazon.co.uk has some.
...the difference is the number of CUDA threads. The 1080 has 2560 cores vs. 1920 for the 1070. For different brands, it is in how they overclock and how many fans they provide for cooling a card.
...Nvidia USA shows out of stock as does Newegg. Two are available at Amazon USA but one is 1,650$. and the the other 1,700$. At that price may as well scrape up another 800$ and get a Quadro P5000 with 16 GB. You will probably never have to worry about a GPU render process dropping out of VRAM.
Agreed, paying 600-800 for a card, then having it render on CPU is a colossal waste of cash.
available in the uk atm but £1099 is a lot for 4 GB of RAM; Nvidia are way too greedy.
Ok, not in stock.
Thanks for he replies!
Where can you buy a Quadro card from? I appear to be a total shame at finding my way around the Nvidia site....
http://www.nvidia.co.uk/buy/graphics-cards/quadro/
Thanks. That means about 33% more cores, does that mean 33% faster in practice?
4 GB? The one at amazon has 12:
"Gigantic 12 GB GDDR5 memory"
https://www.amazon.co.uk/ASUS-NVIDIA-TITAN-Graphics-DL-DVI-I/dp/B00UVQKZBW
Given that GTX 1080's are available on Amazon right now for as little as $600 - I believe that's your sweet spot for price to performance. You're going to pay three times the money for a Titan X for a 50% bump in VRAM and a 29% increase in CUDA cores.
Like all things in the hardware world, it's all a question of your budget. Pick your budget and then look at what you can get for it. Don't forget that GTX 980 Ti's can be had for around $400 on eBay all day long these days - which I believe would be a better choice than the comparably priced GTX 1070. If your budget is less than $400 you can't go wrong with any of the 10 series cards. They're available in pretty much every price range all the way down to $140 for the GTX 1050. Even the 1050 would be much faster than trying to render iRay with your CPU.
..yes, but paying for a card that may only handle rendering for 50% - 60% of your scenes is a waste.
4 extra
One of my favorite quotes from the original, "Mad Max":
"Speed is just a question of money. How fast to you wanna go?"
Too true.
OK, but that kind of exponential price increase seems to be quite common in the hardware world.
I found a handy comparison of the specs for the different cards:
http://wccftech.com/nvidia-geforce-gtx-1060-pascal-gp106-leak/
kyoto, I'm not sure what you're saying. I have a very meager card with 2GB on it and so I can never do large scenes but if I can get my scene into the card, it stays in the card. That is, I haven't seen it drop down to CPU halfway through a render unless I run into a cooling or power issue. You see it dropping to CPU only due to memory halfway into renders?
The scene either fits on the card from the beginning or it doesn't. I think what Kyoto meant was if half of the individual scenes that you do won't fit on the card, forcing them to render by CPU, then buying that card would be a waste. Kyoto renders some pretty complex scenes, so she needs lots of VRAM.
Most of my renders will fit on my 980ti, for example, but occasionally I have one with too many characters, or trees, or something that kick rendering over to CPU. Maybe 5% of all of my renders. I can live with that.
..I have a 1 GB card, I'd be lucky to render a single Genesis character with hair, clothing, a couple lights and simple backdrop without dropping into CPU mode.
What Petercat mentions is true, most of my scenes (in idle mode) tend to be in the 6 - 7 GB range when uncompressed with some almost as large as 9GB. I make settings that have a "lived in" look, so lots of polys, and in particular, lots of different textures (the latter which is what burns through VRAM). I would at least need at least the resources of Pascal Titan-X to guarantee that the larger ones don't dump to CPU. When I look to do large format rendering for gallery quality prints, a Quadro P5000 might be needed.
ETA:
Just ran a test with the same image both on GPU and CPU. One character in the "T" pose with pretty basic clothing and hair, Mec4D's simple ambient environment, one Photometric spot, and a plain non textured backdrop. First test was at 900 x 900 which quickly exceeded GPU memory so resized it to 600 x 600.
GTX 460 (384 CUDA cores) Peak memory usage 987 MB out of 1024, Render time 23m:45s
i7 930, 2.8 GHz (8 processor cores) Render time 21m:55s.
So much for GPU rendering being faster, at least on my system. I could tell it didn't dump to the CPU in the first test as the memory usage didn't drop off (which would occur once the process was handed off to the CPU) and it was ticking off each iteration in succession while in CPU mode it only updates the progress monitor every 5 to 8 iterations.
Note: just having the Daz programme open during rendering took 248 MB of VRAM Running the two displays without any programme or graphic file open uses only 63 MB.
...just read another post where Nvidia is planning to release a 1080 Ti with 10 GB GDDR5X
More vram is of course always nice. However, Iray is actually quite efficient and and the amount of ram used by DS is acually a poor indicator for vram use. I am using a GTX 1080 for rendering and the scene below fits easily using only about 7Gb (it uses 22.5 Gb in ram when loaded into DS). That is without using any additional tricks like reducing the texture sizes of background features/characters.
Speed wise it is day and night comparing CPU to GPU for this scene. On the GTX1080 it gets to 95% in about 3h. With my hexcore CPU (i3930K) it takes a bit over 20 hours.This scene has dozens of emissive lights and many reflective surfaces that slow things down, so it is pretty tough to render.
So, an 8Gb GPU can go a long way when it comes t rendering.
Ciao
TD
However 1080 GTX has been replaced by GTX 1660. ANd GTX by RTX lineup.
Necro alert :P
???? Sorry I do not understand your comment.????
Why hasn't the 2060, 2070 nor 2080 been mentioned? Are these very inferior?
This thread was four years old, as TheKD alluded to.