iRay Graphics Card Minimum Requirements
TheRetiredSailor
Posts: 260
There is a ton of information in the forums on desktop graphics cards and their compatibility with iRay. I am reviewing this information and doing my best to digest it. That being said, a (simple) minimum requirements for a graphics card to be compatible with iRay would be very nice. Perhaps there's something like that on the internet, and if so, I haven't found it yet.
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I am using Nvidia GTX 980 ti and it gives me fast renders, I have no complaints and in no hurry to upgrade anytime soon.
Thank you! Have you upgraded to DAX Studio 4.11 or are you still on 4.10 (or earlier)? How much memory is on your GTX 980 card?
https://helpdaz.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/115003568443-What-are-the-system-requirements-to-run-Daz-Studio-
Notes: NVIDIA Iray Render Engine: 64-bit only. NVIDIA video card with 4GB+ VRAM recommended.
List of recommended graphics cards:
GTX 690 2x2Gb, GTX 770 4 gb (GTX 780 3Gb and GTX 780 Ti 3Gb not desirable), GTX Titan 6Gb, GTX 970 4Gb, GTX 980 4Gb, GTX 980 Ti 6Gb, GTX Titan X 12Gb, GTX 1050 Ti 4Gb, GTX 1060 6Gb (GTX 1060 3Gb not desirable), GTX 1070 8Gb, GTX 1070 Ti 8Gb, GTX 1080 8GB, GTX 1080 Ti 11Gb, GTX 1650 4Gb, GTX 1660 6Gb, GTX 1660 Ti 6Gb, RTX 2060 6Gb, RTX 2070 8Gb, RTX 2080 8Gb, RTX 2080 Ti 11 Gb, RTX Titan 12 Gb.
You can use video cards with 2 and 3 Gigabytes - render SIMPLE scene with only ONE-TWO character with clothes and hair and nothing more.
The more CUDA cores, the faster the render.
Perfect! Thank you!
Are you looking to update your system or seeing if an existing system can do the job?
I am thinking of updating an existing Windows system for iRay rendering. The system is an HP Pavillion Elite HPE-560z with a somewhat boring Radeon graphics card. The 6 core CPU was nice during the days that I used 3Delight.
https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c02682447 ;
Let me remind you that Radeon graphics cards are not suitable for Iray rendering. Only nVidia videocards are required for Iray rendering.
Right, hence the reason for my interest in an affordable nVidia video card. :)
GTX970 is what I have and it's barely passable, wouldn't go lower than that in terms of cuda cores.
Your graphics card have 1664 CUDA cores and 4 Gigabytes of memory. This is still sufficient for rendering until the NVidia company stops supporting drivers for your card:) I have GTX 1660 Ti 6Gb with 1536 CUDA cores.
I finally decided to test out the iRay renderer with a simple Genesis figure, and it renders fine with CPU (all 4 cores at 100%).
I am just starting out doing viewport renders (turn draw type from Textured to iRay), or Spot Renders with iRay set as renderer -- No full-fledged proper render yet -- still in testing phase.
I then set to render GPU only and turned off CPU, but nothing renders -- Only an announcement in lower left corner stating something like preparing iRay renderer with an orange bar that fills up (going left to right) over and over for several minutes on the lower right hand side.
If I turn back on the CPU, it immediately starts to render with all 4 CPU cores again.
My question is: How do I get it to render with my nVidia GPU video card?
I am here, same as OP, looking for minimum specs that should work -- I know what is recommended, and what all of you that have been successfully rendering with have at their disposal, but I can't afford an upgrade for a few years, and I would like to know why my card won't initialize while a similar card (but one family higher) with same video memory is in nVidia's iRay benchmark testing.
My card is nVidia GeForce GTX 650 TI with 2 G RAM and 768 Cuda Cores.
I am not looking for any kind of fast rendering, nor do I expect it -- I just want to know why mine won't initialize while a GeForce GTX 750 Ti with 2 G RAM that is included in the benchmark test does?
nVidia iRay benchmarks : https://www.migenius.com/products/nvidia-iray/iray-benchmarks-2015
Is the 600 series excluded from working at all, and iRay only starts working with the 700 series, or am I not doing something correctly to get iRay to work with my card?
Wasa-Sayan, you bring up a good point which is end-of-life. Thank you. I would hate to spend the money on a graphics card only to find that it is end of life before I get "my moneys worth out of it."
DaremoK3, I cannot answer your question but I would be curious what the answer is if you find out.
Don't think your card is supported; if it was, it would add little and at 2GB only hold very small scenes - if at all if it also drives your monitor(s).
What version of Studio are you using? I seem to recall, 4.11 changing what cards are supported.
My card has 6GB of memory and I use DS 4.10 and I used it with no problem on the beta DS 4.11
Yeah, it seems that my card is not supported in the new 4.11 Iray build. It appears to be about the Compute Capability -- Mine is 3.0 -- Looks like one needs 7.0 for Cuda 9 in their cards.
I was wrong about my card -- It is only 650 (384 Cuda cores), and not TI model -- I was going from memory, and when I researched online, the 650's I found were only 1 G VRAM and mine is 2 G VRAM (which the TI model is). Mine is an MSI brand, so I guess they added an extra gig of memory, and somehow Speccy is showing I have 2048 physical RAM and 2048 virtual RAM with an available 4096 RAM for GPU usage.
I am not clear if that means I have 4 G VRAM available to use with my GPU card to load textures into memory or not.
However, the good news for me - I redid my tests on my DS 4.9 drive, and my GPU renders Iray, but even though I had CPU disabled, my four cores were being utilized while rendering, though, only at a combined 25 percent usage. This will suffice for me for now if I want to do small Iray renders to suppliment my NPR workflows...
@DaremoK3
Studio version 4.11 also requires Nvidia driver version 418.81 or newer.
With Studio 4.11 supporting Nvidia's 20x0 and 16x0 cards out, there should be some used 10x0 cards entering the marketplace.
Thank you, fastbike1, I remember reading something regarding that, but then I forgot all about it.
My last driver update was 390-something, so I just downloaded the latest (430.86) -- I'll give it a shot, and see if it works.
I was going off of Rob W's 4.11 beta reports regarding Iray and dropping Compute Capability 2.0 with updating to 7.0 for Cuda 9.
Hopefully, after installing the new drivers, I might get lucky and find CC 3.0 is still supported...
Just reporting back that updating GPU drivers worked -- My old video card can now be used with DS4.11 Iray renderer.
So, it looks like old cards that have at least Compute Capability 3.0 and the latest drivers can be used.
Also, initialization of Iray to GPU (for me) was lighting fast -- faster than starting with CPU, and 10 X's faster than initialization on GPU in DS4.9
I do have a question for any of you GPU gurus out there; I stated earlier in a previous post that nVidia was reporting that I had 4G of available RAM for my card (2G physical, 2G virtual -- non-shared - shared shows 0 [zero]). Now, after updating the drivers it now shows 8G of available RAM for my card (2G physical, 6G virtual -- non-shared - shared shows 0 [zero]). What does this mean, and is it possible I can load more textures/scenes into memory on my card to render only to GPU?
Nope; physical is the important part for rendering.
Hey I'm trying to grab a not $400 plus gpu on eBay used new refurbished i don't care which. What are the minimum requirements for gpus for iray these days? Will a titan black 6gb be good? I know the m4000 Quadro is but that's hitting too close to my max spending for gpus for the month. I can get that if nothing else is available/compatible. Fixed budget here guys. Mind you this computer has NO gpu except the onboard and it's a server motherboard so daz won't even start due to low gpu specs