Best Pc set up
simonrez
Posts: 6
Hi everyone, hope you are all safe and well. I've been using Daz3d for just over 3 months now and have been putting up with my pc just to get me through. I dont have to many problems rendering but then a single portrait can take up to 50 minutes to fully render. I am very limited to what I can do without my pc crashing such as using environments and adding more than 1 figure and props into a scene. I dont really know much about computer hardware but was hoping for some advice with what specs would be the best to get the most out of Daz3d. Appreciate any advice.
Regards
Simon
I forgot to mention my pc has a nvidia gefoce gt230 graphics card and an intel i7 processor. I render with the gpu and cpu on, havent tried with gpu on its own dont know if it can handle it.
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You may want to specify exactly what i7 processor you have, since there are many generations with significantly differing performance capabilities. Your GT 230 card with 500 MB of VRAM won't be able to handle much of anything in Iray and so would need to be upgraded. The biggest things to looks at for GPU rendering are your system RAM and the GPU VRAM--the more you have the more complex scenes you can render; also, to use Iray the GPU must be an NVidia GPU as Iray does not support AMD cards. If you can keep your scene on your GPU than the CPU is less important since it will only be used when setting up the scene for rendering and not for the render itself. The best in class current GPU for IRay is the new RTX 3090, but it is basically unavailable right now and the price may be out of the range of what you want to pay. The 2000 and 3000 GPU's are difficult to find right now, so if you are looking at a more reasonable upgrade I would suggest looking for a GTX 1080 Ti--with 11 GB of VRAM this should allow you to run decent sized scenes (probably around 8-9 G8 figures if you use suitable texture reductions and keep your render sizes below 2k) and still gives acceptable render times. I would also suggest 32 GB of system RAM to avoid the problem of running out of system memory before you run out of VRAM. It is possible that your current system may be too old to handle more recent hardware, so also consider looking at a new system altogether with the RAM/GPU suggestions above.
What is the reasonable price? There's probably an overhead for buying from a local store (though you may feel that is a price worth paying to keep the local store available) and for buying a pre-built system; you may get more for your money by following another route.
8 GB system RAM is going to be a real bottleneck trying to run scenes larger than a single figure in Daz Studio. I would think most systems today should start at 16 GB. My current system had 32 GB RAM and a GTX Titan X (Pascal) GPU, which is a very similar GPU to the 1080 Ti (12 GB VRAM instead of the 1080 Ti at 11 GB). I was finding for larger scenes that I was running up against my system RAM limit, so earlier this year I upgraded my RAM to 64 GB. DDR 4 RAM at 2666-3200 MHz speeds are still fairly inexpensive if you look around (I got my 32 GB as 4 sticks of 8 GB each for $150 US). If you are speccing out a system with a local store that might also be a question to pursue as well. My current system can render scenes with up to 16-17 G3/G8 figures and a reasonable background without dropping off the GPU as long as I reduce figure/clothing/hair textures to 1024x1024 and keep the render resolution below 2k (I usually render at 2160 or 1440 resolution), but these large scenes do take up 35-40 GB of system RAM as well as 11 GB of GPU VRAM.
Thanks so much guys for the replys and info, I better start saving, I suppose if I'm going to upgrade I may aswell do it properly. These are the specs of my current pc, I dont think it would be worth upgrading. Have a nice weekend.
I am an OEM system builder. I would be happy to get you prices on anything you need and tell you who has the best sale on the parts. All I need is the specs you would like and your budget. I myself am looking for a bit of help with length of time with renders. I built my system about 4 years ago now and it takes 10-15 min to render a character with no props. I'm using a Ryzen 5 1600x CPU, 24GB DDR4 2400 Ram, 1x 256GB M.2 SSD, 1x 500GB SSD, 5x 5TB Gaming HDD, and a GTX 1060-3G graphics card. My system has water-cooling I built myself so my CPU stays fairly cool during gaming, video editing, etc. If anyone can help me on recommended settings for render speed I would appreciate it. Would like to get some speed without sacrificing too much quality and i've watched lots of videos on render and still would like advice.
Your problem is "GTX 1060-3G graphics card", get any Nvidia RTX card and the rendering time will be lot less.
My system is the same age as yours, i7-5820K, MSI X99A SLI Plus, 64GB, 6 x 1TB SSD, 8 x 1-4TB HD (some USB) and a RTX 2080 Super with 8GB
A normal complete scene with two clothed characters, architecture and lighting takes about half an hour to render, one character with lighting and no clothing or architecture renders in about 5 minutes.