RAM/Processor Question
anaximanes_2000
Posts: 343
Hello, I want to say that I am not at all knowledgable in anything regarding computers. I have been using a computer and I have:
Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8700 CPU @ 3.20GHz (12 CPUs), ~3.2GHz
Memory: 65536MB RAM
and two NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti
I do not know much, but I was talking to someone at PC Laptops here in Utah and he said that I could get a 30 something core processor and 256 gigs of RAM (instead of the current 64) and we'd just use the same two NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti graphic cards and that it would speed up my Daz work. As I understand the RAM is what is used while I am editing the models and moving them and such and the graphics cards and the 30+ core things are used when I render. Before I pull the trigger on this and upgrade with all this RAM and the new processor, I wanted to make sure all this is true, and thank you!
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Comments
Personally, I would take all that money and pour it into GPU's instead. A i7 and 64gb is pretty good already. That's just me though. That's assuming you use iray though, no idea about 3delight and what would be best for that. For iray, RTX with as much vram as you can afford is what gets you the render power.
I do Iray. I don't know what vram means, but the RTX thing you say might be like my NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti. So, you think buying more graphics cards will make Daz work quicker in the editor? My rendering time is already great, but I was going to buy all that RAM because as I thought I understood, the RAM is used in the editor and not the graphics card at all, and then the graphics card is used in the rendering but not the RAm at all. I guess I could buy a couple more NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti if that will speed up the editing process, moving cameras, adding models, moving them around and stuff. I had no idea, so thanks!
RTX is just the newer line of nvidias. They have faster cuda cores, and also RTX which boosts some things that GTX cards don't have. As far as I know, nothing will really speed up the scene composing part any. I went from a crappy old i5 to a 12 core AMD and doubled my RAM to 32gB, also uses faster speed RAM, didn't notice any boost at all in DS. Working smart, hiding everything you don't need to see, turning off smoothing until the end, when moving stuff around is really the only way I have found to make it all more zippy. The GPU's will probably not do what you are looking for, just make rendering faster. I kinda misunderstood the question. I don't think blowing cash on a crazy system like the one the PC guy trying to sell you will help with what you want to improve either though.
I see, so it does not matter how much RAM that I have, the editing of a scene and posing and such, or dForce type simulations and what-not, cannot be made any faster or smoother. Hmm, that's so strange to me, but thank you for letting me know!
Dforce simulations, make sure you are using GPU(setting is in simulation settings tab, click on the advacned tab in there and pick your fastest GPU), and hide everything the item is not going to collide with. That makes it a lot faster to simulate.
Right now it takes a minute or two (for the simulations), but I assumed the more RAM I had based on what I understood about the editor window (moving objects, posing, and such) the faster it would go. So, say I pan my camera, it's be much smoother and move about easier. That's the biggest surprise to me. Right now if I get 10 or 20 characters into a scene together with buildings and cars or whatever else, the editing can go slower. I assumed with 256 gigs of RAM instead of it using only 64 gigs, that it would, in essence, run about 4 times as smoothly and quickly there. As I said, I am amazed that there is no way to increase that. It's a pity.
I asked in the Daz Software forum and just want a second opinion here from the nuts and bolts types. Right now I have 64 gigs of RAM and I was curious. From what I have read here in the past, it was my understanding that in the editor, that is, the window where we move and pose our models and such, runs on RAM. I know literally nothing about technical things, but I am curious. I have the option, currently, to bring my computer up to 256 gigs of RAM. I thought that meant that in the editor, things would move about quicker, it could handle more objects in the scene more easily, and such as I tweaked my scenes.
So, as a fully ignorant person, since I was told that RAM does not matter for this, what am I going for? I know the graphics cards are only in use while rendering. If I worked at Daz headquarters and I wanted to make a computer for my people that allowed for things being faster in the editor, what would I pile into the computer as far as hardware goes to achieve that? (In other words not graphics cards, so what would it be?)
You've got a lot of things conflated.
You want enough RAM that DS is not swapping to disk all the time. 64Gb is more than enough unless you tend to keep Chrome open with a couple of dozen tabs at the same time.
The editor being sluggish could be due to any number of factors. Are you using iRay preview? If so that is always going to be sluggish. It starts a new "render" every time you make any change to the scene. If posing figures is the major slow down you might have lots of morphs installed which takes the system a while to walk through every tuime you try to pose. If loading is the issue then it could be the speed of the drive the assets are stored on or a duplicate formula error or lots of morphs and other modifiers on the figure.
So before you can get a useful answer you need to describe what the issue is in more detail.
I don't have any issue at all, I did not mean to indicate that I have any problems. I was only asking that if adding more RAM into the computer- if that would speed up anything in regards to Daz. No issues, friend. I'm "fine" with how it is now but wondered if there was a way to increase anything in the computer hardware-wise that would increase the speed at which the editing phase (not the rendering) goes. I don't know what more detail to give besides, literally, anything that can be done to speed it up the functionality within the editor part itself. I tend to use SMooth Shaded and Textured more than selecting Iray view, though I do it too on occasion, but at that point I assume it starts pulling from the graphics and no longer the RAM.
Use Task Manager to look at your CPU and RAM usage. Get something like HwMon to look at VRAM usage. I do my DAZ work on an i7-7700K with 32GB RAM and 2x GTX1080Ti and its fine. More CPU threads isn't going to do much for you and 256GB of RAM is almost certainly overkill, even if you're also running Blender and Substance Painter, for example.
If you want to buy fater GPUs, I'd wait until the RTX30xx series comes out later this year, TBH.
256GB of RAM and a 30 core CPU would be wasted completely with Daz Studio currently, as my understanding is it only uses 2 cores unless rendering and you already have 2x GTX 1080Ti GPU cards which are still very good.
Editing and the viewport does slow down when you have more than a couple of figures loaded, but that's Daz Studio not your system. When editing I have an i7 CPU with 8 cores (16 threads) and in task manager it is barely ticking over. More than 64GB RAM might help but from my testing I doubt it.
Save your money at least until until Nvidia release the next generation on GPU Cards and then think again.
Best Wishes
Steve.
There are two types RAM (actually there are more but only two are within our purchase control), DRAM and VRAM. DRAM, or properly speaking System RAM is what you call RAM in your post's subject and VRAM is what's in the graphic cards.
Iray can be rendered in GPU (graphics card and in this case your 1080Ti) and/or CPU (processor in your post subject). However, rendering in pure GPU mode could be 10 times faster than CPU or more. The quality is the same. The caveat is that to engage GPU only mode, your scene cannot exceed the VRAM present in your GPU. This is because Nvidia handicap the consumer line of GPU (GTX and RTX) for rendering so they cannot be purchased by professionals at a fraction of the cost of its professional line of cards that are no faster than consumer GPU. What this means is that for Iray GPU rendering, there is a ceiling of how much you need as far as DRAM is concerned since VRAM is what matters. If the scene is bigger than your VRAM then the rendering will drop to CPU only mode, which is 10x slower. If the scene is bigger than even your DRAM, two outcomes could happen. One is that Daz will crash. The other is that Windows will engadge Disk Swap mode and your system will slow to a crawl. The last thing you need to know is that you need more DRAM than VRAM, but only to a certain degree. Stuff goes into VRAM is compressed but uncompressed in DRAM, and before rendering in VRAM the stuff needs to prepared in DRAM. The ratio varies but the rule of thumb is between 1:2 to 1:3. Since 1080Ti has 11GB of VRAM, Iray rendering will need ~33GB DRAM. You have 64GB, more than enough.
But and a big BUT, I don't think 20 G8 characters with scenes could fit into 11GB of VRAM so you might be rendering and previewing in CPU only mode without realizing. The slow down is Daz3D switching from GPU mode to CPU mode for running out of VRAM and not because you ran out of DRAM. Going from 64GB to 256GB won't do anything for you unless you go nuts and start to render scenes with 50 characters. A 32 core CPU will be a lot faster than your current CPU with 6 cores. But, here is another BUT, then you will be rendering in CPU mode and the two 1080Ti will be wasted.
Edit: I fortgot to add that VRAM in Nvidia consumer GPU are not stackable. So 2x 1080Ti does not mean 2x11GB=22GB VRAM. Your VRAM budget is still only 11GB, the scene will just render 2x faster. Scenes bigger than 11GB will still drop to CPU only regardless how many 1080Ti you have in the system.
Because nVidia is making realtime raytracing rendering a part of the GPU I agree it makes more sence to spend all that money on one or two nVidia RTX 20XX GPUs but even better because it's already July 2020 would be to wait for nVidia RTX 30XX GPUs. Buy one or two of them as you can afford and actually want. Get GPUs with as much video RAM as possible.
I would not buy a new card now, with the exception of not being able to use the computer at all due to card failure.
Threads merged - please don't start multiple threads on the same topic.
I agree with everyone else: That system is extremely lopsided, emphasizing the wrong areas. If you are not running lots of apps concurrently, even 64 gigs is more than most will need. And there is no point in having many CPU cores because Daz Studio is largely single threaded, and even a middling GPU is much much better at simulation and rendering than the most powerful general purpose CPU you can buy, at any price.
I would sacrifice both CPU cores and memory until I had two 2080tis and a 1200W Titanium (it will pay for itself on your electric bill) power supply.
No doubt someone who earns a nice fat commission on processor and RAM sales. And once you commit, he'll tell you you need to upgrade your motherboard (big fat commission), PSU (another big fat commission), and cooling (and yet another big fat commission), too. D--n f'ing sleezeball. Probably can't even spell DAZ if you spotted him "D-A-."
Go back to the store and ask him to show you a side-by-side demo of how much faster DS runs on a desktop configured with a 32-core CPU and 256GB of RAM runs compared to one with i7 with 64GB, then listen to all the excuses about why he can't do it.
I use Studio to build a scene. I create the character, and then add scene items as required.
I then export to Blender and render there.
Studio isn't your only option for rendering, and neither is Iray within Studio. My opinion, it's easy but not the best. It is, however, perfectly possible to get excellent results with Iray - it's a tool and some folks prefer one to another. Use whatever tool suits you.
I render using a 980ti and a Threadripper (16/32 cores/threads); in Blender, using Cycles, and the Threadripper is usually faster and often by a lot. The same wouldn't be the case if I had a 1080ti... But this shows that throwing cash at the problem isn't always the best solution. I wanted faster renders (and more freedom to tweak); I didn't know if I would get faster renders in Blender, but was interesting in trying because I prefer Cycles node system to Iray's; the bonus is I do get faster renders.
Advice from someone wanting to sell you something is dubious at best.
Well in the next couple of years the current Ryzen 9 3950X CPU with 16 CPU cores and 32 logical cores and others wil doubtless drop to less than $500 and then you can upgrade. Same with RAM, 1x32 RAM modules are expensive and not all motherboards support them yet.
Anyway you look at it it's better to wait & go with one or two Ampere GPUs with at least 12GB+ RAM each then to pay for the expensive 16 core CPUs & 1x32GB RAM modules now. You can augment those later when they are cheaper but they still won't match the perrformance of the Ampere when your scene is able to fit into the RAM of the Ampere.
At any rate, both of those are nice problems to have, just 3 years ago most hobbyist people scoffed at the idea this many CPU cores, realtime raytracing in GPUs, SSDs, massive amounts of system RAM, and so on being available to consumers at affordable for hobbyists consumers but here we are.
So upgrading from a dual core to quad core does nothing in Studio?
I wouldn't want to run Daz on a dual core. Scenes would take too long to begin rendering. When using 2 separete Daz client instances you would have nothing left over for other background system tasks.
I'm actually running a dual core. Beginning rendering is not that slow, but it's not that fast either. Usually it's in the 1.5 minute mark
It is clear your "someone" understands nothing of daz studio. For the most part daz studio is not multithreaded and both iray and dforce use the gpu. So a 30 cores cpu will do nothing. As for the ram it is required about 2x the gpu vram so your actual 64G is fine for 2x1080ti, extra ram will not get you any benefit.
Unless you want to simulate and render with the cpu that's possible but not recommended since it's much slower.
edit. Same for blender if you care. That is, the blender simulation uses the cpu but it's not multithreaded for the most part. Then cycles and eevee use the gpu. Unless you want to render with the cpu that's possible but much slower.
The main issue with RAM and rendering is the load time, i.e. the time it takes the RAM to dump the scene into the VRAM of the GPU. Once it gets to the GPU, it doesn't seem that the CPU adds much. So the more RAM you have, the faster that data gets transferred to the GPU. Seems like the CPU you already have is pretty decent. You may notice a minute or so of faster rendering if you up the RAM to 128, but I doubt you would see a difference going from 128 to 256.
Just out of curiousity, does a Tesla K40 12GB GDDR5 GPU Graphics Accelerator Card speed up DS render time in a i7?
I'm only running 16GB on the motherboard itself.
It depends on which card you wanna compare it to ~~ Such a card's spec is just higher than a GTX 980 but far behind a 1080ti, then you can imagine its performance~ Besides, 16G RAM is not enough for Daz to run and render happily...
but still depends on what you're gonna render and your patience for sure~~
You'd be surprized. 16GB Ram on the i7 motherboard is blazing fast as compared to AMD A8 (first gen probably, I've had it for a while). :)
Support for Kepler GPUs was removed back in 2020 https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/6105227/#Comment_6105227
I suppose you could get it working if you're willing to use an older version of DS and Nvidia drivers to match. I have a GTX 770 (Kepler) that still renders, but that's only because it's on a Window 7 machine that I rarely use and isn't connected to the internet.
If you're using CUDA (which Iray does), Nvidia cards have a lifespan of about 6 years or so before they're removed from support. Those old Teslas/Quadros/Titans on Ebay are cheap for a reason, they're no longer supported, or about to lose support.
Also, the K40 has rendering performance somewhere between the GTX 970 and GTX 1060. There are current gen CPUs that are faster.
My recommendation; Increase your RAM and just buy a 3060 12Gb. I know it'll hurt, price-wise, a 3060 (new) is roughly 8 times the price of a K40 on Ebay, but you'd get nearly 10 times the performance. It's probably the best price/performance/VRAM card ever for Iray (even better than the 1080ti) and I don't think we'll see anything similar until the 5000 series.
It's either that or wait for the 4060 to release, but given the 40 series pricing so far, I don't think it will be that great of a deal.
Aha, got it~ but it's just a comparions in between your PCs. You may check the syestem requirements of Daz Studion, 2GB RAM is a minimum （3GB+ recommended, haha~ it could be 16, 64, ... 128）.
I often have 2 - 3 DAZ sessions opened, mid-size scene + a couple of figures in there, then 30GB RAM has gone...