The best rendering rig possible?
craanbery
Posts: 14
What is the ABSOLUTE best rig money could buy for Daz exclusevily?
I just want to know what's possible
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I saw a rig over at the Octane forums with 7 water-cooled GTX1080tis (I suspect he's upgraded to 2080ti's by now) and more memory than the Library of Congress. Don't even want to think about what that cost or how many kilowatts that thing eats.
Absolute best possible? You need the most CPU threads and PCIE lanes possible. That would be a dual 7742 rack with 256 threads and just less than that PCIE lanes. You then have a mobo custom made with a 1x PCIE slot for every available PCIE lane. You then attach a Quadro RTX 8000 on a 1x to full length riser cable to each 1x slot. This monstrosity will draw roughly 1.21 gigawatts, break most of the laws of god and man but if you want sheer unadultyerated render speed in DS that is it right now.
I wonder if the sysadmins at Oak Ridge can run Blender when no one is looking and render with 24,000+ GPUs.
render farms
Thank you for the comments, guys!
And as helpful as a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. :)
This is too open-ended...
"Rig", as in a single consumer home-computer, crammed with hardware?
For "Daz3D", or for "Rendering", which is IRAY or 3DeLight? (They are not the same. Daz doesn't do the final rendering itself. It uses one of two "rendering engines" to do the final rendering.) Daz is simply the interface to the rendering devices. Manging the items which you setup to be rendered. Daz, itself, has little specific requirements and gains little, itself, from having a powerful system. IRAY and 3DeLight, however, are more noticable to specific system demands. As well as some of the additional "helper" programs that assist rendering.
Going all-out, the "best" setup would not be a single "rig". Rather a terminal and a dedicated "render-farm", of some kind. Any singular "rig", would honestly be sort-of stalled by trying to run Daz AND also render, at the same time.
For a single rig, I would suggest one that has an on-chip GPU, for display, so all other cards can be run in TCC mode. (That excludes most top of the line CPUs, which do not have built-in GPUs, like mine.) That will leave all available memory for rendering, instead of windows "taking memory" for itself, via the WDDM drivers, which standard drivers "speak through", to display anything in windows. Using a motherboard with 8 slots, but keeping in mind that windows normally will only see 4 similar cards of any single "type". (That may be important since "Daz", speaks to the cards through windows, so they can be selected for use. I am unsure if having them in TCC mode will bypass windows internal "limit" to "similar cards".)
You would need a motherboard that can have up to 8x (16x PCIe lanes, per card, in all populated slots.) To also take advantage of the "speed". However, I know of no such motherboard and CPU combo, which will also run "Windows 10". There are a few which can be run with Linux, and using IRAY-Remote to render. That is a subscription service, additionally required for purchase, which Daz does not manage or sell.
Then, ultimately, you will need 8x of the "fastest" cards, with the "most memory". Which, at the moment, are limited to the consumer versions, and would be the 2080 Ti (Founders Edition), until the Titan variation comes with an RTX setup, or until they release a faster version with more memory. (Memory being the more critical part, as if it won't fit into memory, then your speed is CPU speed, not GPU accelerated.) {I would say the Titan-V would be "better", but it only has one more GB of VRAM and does not have the RTX potential speed gains. Nor is it working well at the moment, in my system. Though, 2080's also seem to be having issues too. Buyer beware. I have held my cards for over two years and still waiting for functional support in Daz. Though, I have not tried IRAY-Remote with them. That is not as bound to Daz as the internal version they include.}
RAM and Hard drives are honestly up to your desires. You don't need more than 2x more RAM than your largest single GPU has, which would be more than enough, since everything will ultimately be processed in the GPU, but only if it even fits into the GPU memory. Reading and writing to the hard-drives is such a small portion of the process that it almost doesn't matter. The file sizes are a mix of many, many small and large files, so you would not get any consistant "throughput".
As far as building a "Render farm"... The possibilities are nearly endless... You are not that rich if you are asking this question in a forum and not directly to Daz or IRAY or asking a major network builder. So, I am left to assume that you were asking about building a single rig, which "does it all", "the fastest it can". (Which is what I outlined above.)
The most slots I have found, which windows 10 will run on, will reduce into 4x (8x PCIe lanes). There are three motherboards which will do that for an i9 which has at-least 32 PCIe lanes. (You need more, because other onboard components also need PCIe lanes for Video/Sound/Sata/Networking/RAM etc... Mine has 44 total. https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/126699/intel-core-i9-7980xe-extreme-edition-processor-24-75m-cache-up-to-4-20-ghz.html)
There are AMD processors which have a lot of PCIe lanes too, and more cores. However, it is honestly only the number of PCIe lanes which is important, as that is how fast data can potentially be sent to and gotten from the GPUs. (Again, that is honestly a fraction of the time of any render. So it isn't a big deal if all cards were simply on a 1x, 2x, or 4x PCIe slot. Daz has never come near maxing-out the 8x bandwidth of any of my four cards.)
NOTE: You can run any card with as little as a 1x PCIe bus. Thus, you can expand to more potential cards in one system. You can have more then the 8 physical slots, by simply buying more slots in a riser-card. As long as you have enough PCIe lanes to spare. Though, I think there is a specific card that can share lanes, or increase lanes. But I do not know if it would work in windows. Again, now we are breaching into "render farm" hardware and servers, not consumer Home-PCs.
Consumer cards cannot be put into TCC. The RTX Titan has been out for well over a year. You do not need or particularly want x8 or x16 lanes for cards for rendering. Its just faster loading the scene into VRAM at the start of the render. There are consumer motherboards, meant for mining, that have 18 x1 slots. iRay needs one CPU thread per GPU so those cards, which can only fit CPU's having no more than 8 threads, cannot be fully utilised by iRay but they exist.
The no more than 8 GPU's, per driver type, was eliminated last year, assuming you installed the creators update.
There are workstation motherboards with 7 full length PCIE slots, some are even all wired as x16 (some direct to the CPU and some through the chipset). The limitation on PCIE slots has more to do with case dimensions than it does with HW limits (as the mining boards show). Mid tower cases limit themselves to 6 PCIE slots because of space (more just wouldn't fit when PSU's were bigger). Full towers have traditionally had 8 spaces, EATX MoBo's can have 7) so the bottom slot could have a double width card. But there is no reason a PC has to be in a case, or a desktop case, at all. I have servers that support 11 or 12 full length PCIE slots. One of those is used by a video production studio to render Premier which doesn't have a Linux version so Windows will definitely run on such a system, although it was built a while back and we had to stop at 8 Quadros due to Windows (just made a note to tell the salesman to pitch them more GPU's so thanks for making me think about this).
Also there is nothing saying you cannot have a server rack, or an upright server (although I'm no fan of them) in your home. My NAS is an old 2U rack my company was throwing out. They are loud so you'd want to put it somewhere where the noise wouldn't be an issue.