Daz3D studio 4.12 : best graphics card cost/performance

Joe_88816

Hi,

Graphics cards like Nvidea Titan X offer very fast render times (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVe6FNd4yQc) however they are also very costly.  I'd like to approach these (almost) realtime performance by finding another card that could render a similar scene in seconds.   Since this is a hobby I cannot spend the budget of Titan X.  Is there a card that can achieve this on a low budget ? Thanks for your suggestions.

Joeri

 

kenshaw011267

This is an impossible question to answer. The consumer grade Turing cards have fewer CUDA the cheaper they get. So how much you spend directly dictates the rendering speed.

BTW the RTX Titan is not real time in iRay renders. It may be fast but most renders won't be done in seconds even with it. 

Kitsumo

There's a thread that might be able to help. It doesn't have price/performance, but they have all the performance and prices together so you can get an idea of what's better or worse.

Edit: I guess it does include iterations per dollar per hour, so I guess that is price/performance? Dammit Jim, I'm a doctor, not a statistician.

mclaugh

Color me skeptical, but I suspect there's a large degree of "fakery" in that video. The thing that jumped out at me almost immediately is that if you look at the buildings, street, and props, the lighting and shadow positions (other than the shadows cast by the vehicle) don't change when the view is rotated as they would if those elements were models, suggesting that the only model in the scene is the vehicle. MEC4D seems to confirm that in his reply to Pas Par's question about the street background model, where he states that the street background is a 360° HDRI. If that's the case, the purported "real time" rendering speed needs to be taken with a huge dose of salt.

kenshaw011267

mclaugh said:

Color me skeptical, but I suspect there's a large degree of "fakery" in that video. The thing that jumped out at me almost immediately is that if you look at the buildings, street, and props, the lighting and shadow positions (other than the shadows cast by the vehicle) don't change when the view is rotated as they would if those elements were models, suggesting that the only model in the scene is the vehicle. MEC4D seems to confirm that in his reply to Pas Par's question about the street background model, where he states that the street background is a 360° HDRI. If that's the case, the purported "real time" rendering speed needs to be taken with a huge dose of salt.

The only thing to render in that video is the car and even as simple as that is its still taking several seconds just to get to the point where it isn't obviously not converged at low res passed through YT's compression codec and that's with 2 GTX Titan X. My 1080ti and 2070 have significantly more CUDA than a pair of those and my renders routinely take a half hour or more.

mclaugh

kenshaw011267 said:

mclaugh said:

Color me skeptical, but I suspect there's a large degree of "fakery" in that video. The thing that jumped out at me almost immediately is that if you look at the buildings, street, and props, the lighting and shadow positions (other than the shadows cast by the vehicle) don't change when the view is rotated as they would if those elements were models, suggesting that the only model in the scene is the vehicle. MEC4D seems to confirm that in his reply to Pas Par's question about the street background model, where he states that the street background is a 360° HDRI. If that's the case, the purported "real time" rendering speed needs to be taken with a huge dose of salt.

The only thing to render in that video is the car and even as simple as that is its still taking several seconds just to get to the point where it isn't obviously not converged at low res passed through YT's compression codec and that's with 2 GTX Titan X. My 1080ti and 2070 have significantly more CUDA than a pair of those and my renders routinely take a half hour or more.

That's my point. Not saying the rendering speed isn't impressive; just that it's not as impressive as it first appears at a casual glance since it's only rendering the vehicle. Most Daz-ers don't typically render scenes consisting of a single object against a static, non-rendering background, so it's unrealistic to expect  typical scenes to achive "almost realtime" performance for iRay renders.

evilded777

mclaugh said:

Color me skeptical, but I suspect there's a large degree of "fakery" in that video. The thing that jumped out at me almost immediately is that if you look at the buildings, street, and props, the lighting and shadow positions (other than the shadows cast by the vehicle) don't change when the view is rotated as they would if those elements were models, suggesting that the only model in the scene is the vehicle. MEC4D seems to confirm that in his reply to Pas Par's question about the street background model, where he states that the street background is a 360° HDRI. If that's the case, the purported "real time" rendering speed needs to be taken with a huge dose of salt.

What "fakery"?

Its a background and light source, you do know what an HDRI is for, right? And people around here do it all the time. There's a ton of HDRI packs in the store for EXACTLY that purpose. And MEC4D is a she, not a he.

kenshaw011267

evilded777 said:

mclaugh said:

Color me skeptical, but I suspect there's a large degree of "fakery" in that video. The thing that jumped out at me almost immediately is that if you look at the buildings, street, and props, the lighting and shadow positions (other than the shadows cast by the vehicle) don't change when the view is rotated as they would if those elements were models, suggesting that the only model in the scene is the vehicle. MEC4D seems to confirm that in his reply to Pas Par's question about the street background model, where he states that the street background is a 360° HDRI. If that's the case, the purported "real time" rendering speed needs to be taken with a huge dose of salt.

What "fakery"?

Its a background and light source, you do know what an HDRI is for, right? And people around here do it all the time. There's a ton of HDRI packs in the store for EXACTLY that purpose. And MEC4D is a she, not a he.

IMO calling that real time rendering is dishonest, whather its fake is another thing. Real time rendering means fully rendering the 3d scene for each frame output to the monitor. That is clearly not happening in that video.

RayDAnt

Joe_88816 said:

Hi,

Graphics cards like Nvidea Titan X offer very fast render times (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVe6FNd4yQc) however they are also very costly.  I'd like to approach these (almost) realtime performance by finding another card that could render a similar scene in seconds.   Since this is a hobby I cannot spend the budget of Titan X.  Is there a card that can achieve this on a low budget ? Thanks for your suggestions.

Joeri

 

The RTX 2070 and 2060 SUPER have both been testing to be roughly equivalent to the Titan Xp. Keep in mind, though, that the video you posted is a render using TWO of them. Which means you'd be looking at a RTX 2080Ti/Titan RTX (or even a pair of 2070s/2060 SUPERs) for equivalent performance.

Also keep in mind that the only one of these options has as much or more video memory as a Titan X (the Titan RTX.) And memory usage trends are going up. 

 

Kitsumo said:

There's a thread that might be able to help. It doesn't have price/performance, but they have all the performance and prices together so you can get an idea of what's better or worse.

Edit: I guess it does include iterations per dollar per hour, so I guess that is price/performance? Dammit Jim, I'm a doctor, not a statistician.

That field is admittedly difficult to interpret. It gives you the number of iterations you are effectively getting for each US Dollar spent (based on the hardware prices listed.) So the larger the Overall Value the better that purchase from a price/performance perspective.

Keep in mind, though that Overall Value DOES NOT take into account video memory capacity (there was simply no good way to include that in the equation.) And a GPU with too low VRAM for your needs is useless for Iray.

MoonCraft3D

I have the 2080i, 64g of ddr4, and an i9core cpu and love it.

I slam out renders and even animations in Daz with ease.

mclaugh

 

kenshaw011267 said:

evilded777 said:

mclaugh said:

Color me skeptical, but I suspect there's a large degree of "fakery" in that video. The thing that jumped out at me almost immediately is that if you look at the buildings, street, and props, the lighting and shadow positions (other than the shadows cast by the vehicle) don't change when the view is rotated as they would if those elements were models, suggesting that the only model in the scene is the vehicle. MEC4D seems to confirm that in his reply to Pas Par's question about the street background model, where he states that the street background is a 360° HDRI. If that's the case, the purported "real time" rendering speed needs to be taken with a huge dose of salt.

What "fakery"?

Its a background and light source, you do know what an HDRI is for, right? And people around here do it all the time. There's a ton of HDRI packs in the store for EXACTLY that purpose. And MEC4D is a she, not a he.

IMO calling that real time rendering is dishonest, whather its fake is another thing. Real time rendering means fully rendering the 3d scene for each frame output to the monitor. That is clearly not happening in that video.

This. Exactly.

The hook for the video implies that the entire scene is being rendered, not just the vehicle. Clearly, that's what the OP (and most of those commenting on YT) thought was being demonstrated:

I'd like to approach these (almost) realtime performance by finding another card that could render a similar scene in seconds. 

 That's what's "fake" (notice the quotation marks, both here and earlier, @evilded777: you do know they're for, don't you?) about it.

rrward

Okay, on-topic: Best bang for the buck? The 2060 Super.

captainklutz_a2ec859073

On a sort of related issue.

There does appear to be a problem with the most recent nvidia drivers & IRay. My previously adequate old GTX690 is now not being used in renders with the most recent drivers applied.

Now whether nvidia will be bothered that much I don't know, but it is either them or IRay that have to sort that compatibility issue.

:0/

RayDAnt

rrward said:

Okay, on-topic: Best bang for the buck? The 2060 Super.

Here's a quick chart of the currently tested best bang-for-buck cards out right now at each scene capacity:

Scene Capacity	Iterations Per Dollar	GPU
24	11.594	Titan RTX
12	13.499	Titan Xp
11	26.937	2080Ti
8	44.744	2070 SUPER
6	41.260	GTX 1660
4	37.450	GTX 1650
2	25.350	GTX 1050 2GB

Beleive it or not the 2060 SUPER is actually not as good a deal as the 2070 SUPER (assuming we're talking about the listed prices.)

rrward

RayDAnt said:

rrward said:

Okay, on-topic: Best bang for the buck? The 2060 Super.

Here's a quick chart of the currently tested best bang-for-buck cards out right now at each scene capacity:

Beleive it or not the 2060 SUPER is actually not as good a deal as the 2070 SUPER (assuming we're talking about the listed prices.)

I stand corrected.

IceCrMn

Ya know, when iray first debuted in Studio a single 12 gig Titan card could render in real time. A PA here actually has videos of herself doing exactly that on her youtube channel.And she also chronicled the shift from when she could and then couldn't.I don't know where the old thread is that she made talking about this,but there is one here ,,,somewhere.

At the rate we are going I'll need a $3 million render farm with it's own 5 megawatt power generation plant in about 4-5 years just so I can wait 15 minutes to render a single frame of a nude character with no hair and a low-res HDRI for lighting.
Or I'll be back to week (or two) long CPU renders.

I'll stick with CPU renders.And when I decide it has become to burdensome or time consuming to continue with this hobby; I'll find another hobby.

I'm not tossing the cost of new car every year into a hardware bottomless pit.It just isn't worth it to me.

RayDAnt

IceCrMn said:

Ya know, when iray first debuted in Studio a single 12 gig Titan card could render in real time.

To be clear, this is categorically impossible. Iray Photoreal is an unbiased rendering engine. Meaning that it leaves BOTH variables to the right of the equals sign in the folliwing equation unfixed in order to fulfill its role of being a real-world implementation of phyiscally based rendering (PBR):  

visual quality = computation complexity * computation time 

 

TheKD

IceCrMn said:

Ya know, when iray first debuted in Studio a single 12 gig Titan card could render in real time. A PA here actually has videos of herself doing exactly that on her youtube channel.And she also chronicled the shift from when she could and then couldn't.I don't know where the old thread is that she made talking about this,but there is one here ,,,somewhere.

At the rate we are going I'll need a $3 million render farm with it's own 5 megawatt power generation plant in about 4-5 years just so I can wait 15 minutes to render a single frame of a nude character with no hair and a low-res HDRI for lighting.
Or I'll be back to week (or two) long CPU renders.

I'll stick with CPU renders.And when I decide it has become to burdensome or time consuming to continue with this hobby; I'll find another hobby.

I'm not tossing the cost of new car every year into a hardware bottomless pit.It just isn't worth it to me.

I think you are talking about mec4d, if it is, I saw those vids. She was showing off the preview render in viewport, not a final render. If you tweak the settings low, you can get that kinda quick performance on a 1070 even, but the quality is not nearly as good as an actual render. I render with a 2080 super and a 1070, most of my renders in indoor environments take at least an hour for final renders, and that's with ghost lights. Outdoor HDRI lit takes minutes. You can slice away/hide all the walls and ceilings to let hdri light inside, but then it makes it look wrong to my eye.

kenshaw011267

TheKD said:

IceCrMn said:

Ya know, when iray first debuted in Studio a single 12 gig Titan card could render in real time. A PA here actually has videos of herself doing exactly that on her youtube channel.And she also chronicled the shift from when she could and then couldn't.I don't know where the old thread is that she made talking about this,but there is one here ,,,somewhere.

At the rate we are going I'll need a $3 million render farm with it's own 5 megawatt power generation plant in about 4-5 years just so I can wait 15 minutes to render a single frame of a nude character with no hair and a low-res HDRI for lighting.
Or I'll be back to week (or two) long CPU renders.

I'll stick with CPU renders.And when I decide it has become to burdensome or time consuming to continue with this hobby; I'll find another hobby.

I'm not tossing the cost of new car every year into a hardware bottomless pit.It just isn't worth it to me.

I think you are talking about mec4d, if it is, I saw those vids. She was showing off the preview render in viewport, not a final render. If you tweak the settings low, you can get that kinda quick performance on a 1070 even, but the quality is not nearly as good as an actual render. I render with a 2080 super and a 1070, most of my renders in indoor environments take at least an hour for final renders, and that's with ghost lights. Outdoor HDRI lit takes minutes. You can slice away/hide all the walls and ceilings to let hdri light inside, but then it makes it look wrong to my eye.

1080ti and 2070 here and I have the same.