Graphics Card recommendations?

Sector Zero

I'm trying to help a friend set up a PC for Daz rendering and I'm no expert on the currently available graphics card offerings. What would be the minimum viable card you'd recommend, sort of a midline card and which very expensive cards would you NOT recommend? Thanks for any guidance!

TheMysteryIsThePoint

Peruse RayDAnt's IRay benchmark page to see what hardware your friend would be satisfied with.

nonesuch00

I wouldn't recommend any AMD video cards that cost over $150 if your intent is to render in DAZ Studio in iRay or render in Blender for that matter, until AMD has a better and more widely available rendering software of their own. Their current renderer offering is improving but it's not nearly as good or fast enough yet and isn't available in DAZ Studio either.

Your friend should wait for a nVidia GeForce RTX 3060 8GB will be good for less than $500. For less than a $1000 the nVidia GeForce RTX 3080 20GB when it's available.

LeatherGryphon

I placed my minimum viable card specs at the level of the Nvidia 1660 tech.  Most manufacturers that produce graphic cards using the Nvidia 1660 chip technology include 6GB of video RAM on the card.  The size of the graphics board (and its number of fans)  can vary as can the quality of the memory and circuit card manufacturing process.  This is usually echoed by the price of the board.  Better named brands of board manufacturers are EVGA, Gigabyte, Asus, MSI, ASrock.

I'm not sure, but I believe the Nvidia 1650 level chips usually include only 4GB of Video RAM, which some DAZers say is not really enough for more than moderate sized scenes using IRay rendering.  Whereas the 6GB in the typical Nvidia 1660 level boards being better, and of course the 10xx,  20xx and the newest 30xx series boards with 8GB or more are useful for bigger scenes rendered probably faster, but are also even more expensive or still "unobtainium".  So, if price, or physical card size or power supply, or cooling concerns are a problem, then I've found that the 1660 level cards can be found for about $250 (US) and I've been quite happy with the 2-fan one I got from MSI that fit (although tightly) in a standard Hewlett Packard desktop microATX* motherboard case.

However, I am not a graphics card expert and this is just my experience with going through the process of learning about graphics card in my quest of my own "minimum viable" system.

*Note:  Edited to correct nomenclature.  I originally said "miniATX" but meant "microATX".  This is one case where "micro" is bigger than "mini".  Flog the guy who named those tiniest of ATX boards "mini"   Must have been somebody in marketing not engineering.  

Sector Zero

Hey thanks all for the comments. However, before I could relate this to my mate he went and bought a PC with the nvidia RTX 2080. Is this a decent card? Will it be capable of doing decent iray renders?

nonesuch00

LeatherGryphon said:

I placed my minimum viable card specs at the level of the Nvidia 1660 tech.  Most manufacturers that produce graphic cards using the Nvidia 1660 chip technology include 6GB of video RAM on the card.  The size of the graphics board (and its number of fans)  can vary as can the quality of the memory and circuit card manufacturing process.  This is usually echoed by the price of the board.  Better named brands of board manufacturers are EVGA, Gigabyte, Asus, MSI, ASrock.

I'm not sure, but I believe the Nvidia 1650 level chips usually include only 4GB of Video RAM, which some DAZers say is not really enough for more than moderate sized scenes using IRay rendering.  Whereas the 6GB in the typical Nvidia 1660 level boards being better, and of course the 20xx and the newest 30xx series boards with 8GB or more are useful for bigger scenes rendered probably faster, but are also even more expensive or still "unobtainium".  So, if price, or physical card size or power supply, or cooling concerns are a problem, then I've found that the 1660 level cards can be found for about $250 (US) and I've been quite happy with the 2-fan one I got from MSI that fit (although tightly) in a standard Hewlett Packard desktop miniATX motherboard case.

However, I am not a graphics card expert and this is just my experience with going through the process of learning about graphics card in my quest of my own "minimum viable" system.

I have a given nVidia GeForcxe GTX 1650 Super 4GB and it's just OK rendering a 1920x1920 moderately complex iRay scene in DAZ Studio. Next to none of the typical style scenes I make actually fit into the 4GB video RAM. It's why I'm really hestitant to buy anything with less then 20GB video RAM which on my budget means months of saving for a GPU that cost more then all the components of my year old self built AMD Ryzen 7 2700 PC.

LeatherGryphon

sectorzeromedia said:

Hey thanks all for the comments. However, before I could relate this to my mate he went and bought a PC with the nvidia RTX 2080. Is this a decent card? Will it be capable of doing decent iray renders?

Yes.