Update decisions RAM, CPU, GPU....
kgrosser
Posts: 141
Coming from a machine running a Ryzen1600@stock, 32GB DDR3200, GTX1080Ti 11GB RAM, everything on NVMe SSD, these are the questions on my mind where one would expect the largest jumps in performance:
Ryzen3700x or Ryzen 3900x (Not sure that DAZ suuport Multithread better by now to make 4 more cores on the 3900x worth the mark up)
64GB RAM
RTX2080 Super (only 8GB, but large scenes may aslo exceed the 11Gig mark and fall back on CPU) or RTX2080Ti (11GB) (is IRAY Raytracin something that luks around the corner?)
Btw. I am not so much concerned shelving off some minutes of actual render but rather have the smoothest IRAY "live" preview when working on larger scenes...
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Comments
Honestly, if you are looking for the best Iray experience, the RTX 2080 Super would not be much of an upgrade right now from your GTX 1080 ti. (The Tensors and RT cores are not used in the current Daz Studio Iray build) In a brute force Cuda core showdown, the 2080 Super may beat the GTX 1080 ti by a bit in rendering speed, the 1080 ti will win as soon as the scene jumps over that 8GB mark.
I would honestly look into saving up the $2500 and grabbing the Titan RTX with that massive 24GB of VRAM
Als your current motherboard may already support 64GB of RAM. Remember that you can always buy RAM that's faster than your system's max speed, and it will down clock it to what it can handle.
The CPU will make a very small impact on your Daz Studio and Iray performance compared to the GPU (you already have 12 fast threads across 6 cores. (That's plenty unless you are doing very multithreaded CPU heavy tasks)
No idea what motherboard you have but I wouldn't try putting a 3900X in a B350 or X370 board. Some manufacturers straight up aren't supporting Ryzen 3000 in those boards at all, some are supporting it only in some of their boards and even the ones that do may have trouble with power delivery etc. for the 12 core. Personally you'd be looking at a 25 to 40% performance gain by going with a 3600 and that is stilla 65W TDP chip so it should slot into any of those boards that have a bios for Ryzen 3000.
This is an ideal time to upgrade RAM so if you want it now is the time to get it.
The 2080 super is definitely a CUDA upgrade from the 1080ti but it still won't make Iray viewport fast. I doubt even dual RTX Titans would. I currently have a 1080ti and 2070 paired in my rig and Iray viewport is still painfully slow.
From my experience I would say to you to go for the RAM updgrade ONLFY IF you have the right kind of motherboard to support it. Cheack it in a store or the right forum. I also have 64 gb and it really helps overall to exploit my pc at te max of its capabilities and my needs. total winner there.
I would even recoomend a second gpu before a cpu upgrade; again if your motherboard lets you. Personally I use my two gpu for rendering and no cpu since from the tests I did doing otherwise created a bottle neck. So you should also check if your 1080ti works better by itself or along your cpu.
Just have in mind that your actual gpu is 11gb so second one should also same size in order to not decompensate while rendering.
From what I've seen, people have reported that the RTX-2080 (not the super) gives about a 35% improvement in Iray rendering speed from the 1080ti. And assuming the 2080 Super improves on that, we're likely talking something around 40% or more improvement for $700. Seems like a reasonable bang for the buck to me. Though I'm not sure what you're referring to by a "brute force Cuda core showdown", so maybe the 2080 Super isn't as good at that.
Most importantly tough...
When you upgrade to a new GPU.... Do Not Settle For Any Lower Specs!!!!
The current GTX 1080 ti may or may not render as fast, but it can hold a larger scene in VRAM.
Actually that depends. I did a fair amount of testing of the scenes I make and found that virtually all of them fit in 8Gb so I added an RTX 2070 to my 1080ti. I get a substantial boost in overall render speed on 85 to 90% of my renders and when I notice one that isn't running on both I shut the render down and run the scene through Scene Optimizer and then it does fit on both.
Thanks for all the advise. Current decision is to go with a 3700x first (if not for DAZ, other apps will definitely benefit from that), then a memory upgrade (unfortunately the Corsair Vengeance LPXC seems out nof stock with my supplier), and observe what will happen to the 2080Ti pricing (which is down below 1K EUR already) once the 2080Super hits the streets and hopefully Iray makes use of the Tensor cores.
Until then, I have no high hopes DAZ performance will improve with any of those, though. I did some monitoring on my system meanwhile and found get no responding messages all over the place whith CPU, memory, and disk loads fairly low. Seems DAZ ius not doing anything but wait for something. Then again, even when I leave a scene idling in the background, out of asuuden CPU load for DAZ unexpectedly jumps to 80+ percent. Funnily I am under the impression, performance was better on my former Intel CPU and DAZ library sitting on a HDD, possibly even with 4.9 on my current machine. Maybe still, my scenes may just have become way bigger.