Nvidia GeForce 3090/3080/other VRAM question
gtsthrowaway7t
Posts: 6
Looking to upgrade my GPU (Nvidia GeForce 1070, 4.5Gb). I usually like having cityscapes as my environments, so would something like a 3090 with 24GB VRAM be preferable compared to a 3080 10GB VRAM? Are there any other GPUs that would be good?
Is my assumption about needing more VRAM for bigger environments, like a cityscape, flawed by chance? Or since I'm upgrading from a relatively old GPU to a current generation be more than enough?
Thank you in advance for schooling me!
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I've moved from 1070Ti with 8gb vRAM onto 3080 with 10 and so far haven't encountered any memory issue. I've thrown at it dForce hairs, big Stonemaosn environments without optimization, 8K textures and ultra scatter and it somehow stood up to every challenge I threw at it. It of course must be very freeing to not have to monitor the memory usage on 3090s but far as I can tell, for the present time at least, 3080 seems quiet able and up to the task, especially being more affordable than the other :)
Hope that helps,
V.
As a TITAN RTX owner, yes, having 24GB of VRAM is liberating and if you can find. and afford, one of those 3090s, go for it!
Definately, if you got the money, you want a 3090 with 24GB
I upgraded from a 1070Ti (8GB) to the 3090 and it is phantastic. Previously I used Scene Optimizer a lot. It works but also is somewhat cumbersome. Now I just compose the scene and hit render (at least for scenes of a comparable complexity). So cool. Also I do more in the Iray preview mode which appears to be much more fluent. Its so inviting for experimenting with shaders, materials and lighting. Last but not least its a huge timesaver: renders which took 1h now last 15min. I dont have CPU fallbacks anymore.
I could afford it because I originally had planned and saved for a Titan and even though it stills hurts the bank account of a hobbyist, to me it was totally worth it. If a was a professonal where time is money it would be even more of a no-brainer.
No I'm not being sponsored by nvidia :-)
I have the RTX 3080 and it is working fine with all I throw at it.
If you can afford it, I would always recommend getting the card with the most RAM; for us renderers the 3090 is almost a steal considering how much a card with so much RAM used to cost. Almost a steal, but still damn expensive really.
As I render in Blender, I've been also considering the AMD gpus; but considering they are at best about equal to the 3090 and with less RAM, I'll be going 3090 - unless things change between now and when they cease being the equivalent of vapourware.
The only thing I would add, concerning 3090s (and possibly 3080s too), pay very close attention to your cooling system, and get a good PSU as well, both will serve you well in the long run and cheaping out on them can wreck everything. One thing I've seen so far that kinda scared me off from 3090 for the time being (except for the price and it not being effectively in stock lol) is very high temperatures, fans that ship with it are not enough, so do plan to invest in extra cooling and power supply. 3080s temp so far has not been that concerning on my end but definetly needs an upgrade down the road too.
Wow, there are a couple on amazon canada, but at 2519 + taxes, that's a hard nope from me lol......
I did max out the RAM of a 3090. I noticed the temperatures were really low during an IRAY render so I checked my CPU usage and it was at 100%! So then I fired up Memory Assistant and the scene was using 27 GB of RAM. So it is still quite possible to max out the RAM of a 3090. Looks like I should be getting a Quadro RTX A6000 with 48 GB RAM!
The latest version of VRAY is introducing an "Initial out-of-core implementation" to handle very large scenes. However there is a slowdown in performance when the textures are loaded in main RAM vs GPU RAM.
https://www.chaosgroup.com/vray/3ds-max/whats-new
https://forums.chaosgroup.com/forum/v-ray-for-3ds-max-forums/v-ray-for-3ds-max-general/1029921-vray-gpu-bring-stuff-out-of-vram-possible
What is this "Memory Assistant"? I doubt it's saying what you actually are expecting. DAZ Studio proper will use the RAM it needs in system RAM and send geometry & materials to the nVidias video card after proprocessing for render. If "Memory Assistant" isn't seperating those out for you it's not really of much practical help.
He's referring to this script https://www.daz3d.com/iray-memory-assistant
And it does seperate the system ram and vram, see attached image
Did not know about Iray Memory Assistant. Before my time by alot. So thanks!
So I tried it and the VRAM isn't reporting correcting. Have 9.6GiB free in log that I pointed it too. This script recognizes it as 9.6MB lol.
Not a big deal, as the deficit it reports, is now basically my VRAM requirement + 0.001 GiB (or that 9.6MB).
Looks like not available yet? Availability notifcation service available at bottom >> https://www.pny.com/nvidia-rtx-a6000
In that marketing-overview they talk about "Connect two RTX A6000s with NVIDIA NVLink™ for 96 GB of combined GPU memory. " But I guess the NVlink not allowing/recognizing memory pooling is an IRAY issue as opposed to a card issue?
EDIT Update: Found a thread discussing why memory pooling presently doesn't work. Exception maybe Iray Server under Linux.
Seems that isn't totally correct. Last post in that thread pointed to this https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/5701921/#Comment_5701921
There was memory pooling for textures. Just not geom or lights.
May just be worth getting 2x3090 vs 1xA6000.
OK, don't forget, it's just an estimate.Once you actually start a render in Windows open the Task Manager, go to the Performance Tab, and go to the GPU0 (or more if you have them) icon & you'll get direct measures of that while you render.
i upgraded from Gigabyte RTX 2080 Gaming OC to KFA2 RTX 3090 and it was the best upgrade i have ever done.
this card is crazy fast and the amount of stuff you can put in the scenes has almost no limits to it.
i think i have used up to 21gb of ram on the card but that scene was packed with G8F models all at high resolution for an groupe photo.
one tip here
if you are about to add that much stuff into one scene you also need alot of RAM so if you are sitting on 32gb now 64 is a must.
for that scene that i talked about i think i used 52gb of RAM.
i had 32gb of ram before but i also upgraded it to 64gb the same time that i got the 3090.
and last
if you want to load an scene that uses around 50gb of ram you also want the fastest NMVe disc you can get if you dont want to wait 30minutes for the scene to load.
i have Samsung 970 Evo Plus right now but i will get the 980 pro when they have them in stock.
conclusion: upgrading to 3090 and you also want to upgrade the amount of RAM and harddrive aswell.
the scene that used 21gb of ram wiht 4096 texture size in the rendering settings.
its 6 G8F models (one on the ground not visible here)
2 G3F models and i G8M model.
all models and clothes/hairs at high resolution (sub d level 2-3 for everything)
One Hum 3D car at high resolution.
HDRI map at 16K
and one last note:
Dropping texture size for this scene to 2048 instead of 4096 reduced the GPU Ram usage to 14gb.
And......
The RTX 3080 Ti is supposed to be dropping End of February.
That will "supposedly" bring the 3080 up to 20Gb of memory and priced at $999.
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-geforce-rtx-3060-rtx-3080-ti-ampere-rumored-launch-dates
Really like that there will be a RTX 3060 12GB. I guess I will have to wait to see how it performs in ray tracing compared to the RTX 3070 8GB and what it costs.
It's official the RTX 3060 12GB card has officially been announced, and only uses 170-Watts of power. A couple of drawbacks compared to the RTX 3060 Ti 8GB....
The 3060 Ti version has 4,864 Cuda cores, while the straight 3060 version has 3,584 Cuda cores.
The 3060 Ti version has 256-bit Memory Interface, while the straight 3060 version has 192-bit Memory Interface.
Source:
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/graphics-cards/30-series/rtx-3060-3060ti/
Interesting discussions here. I am very reluctant to go for anything less than the 12GB which will be available in the up-coming RTX 3060 (end of Feb) but I am interested to know more about how people are claiming that 10GB is fine for them. Unfortunately, that 3060 doesn't look like it will be much of an improvement over the previous 2060 when it comes to raw power.
What kind of scenes? Is Ampere technology more efficient in its VRAM demands (I have a GTX 1070 8GB at the moment)? Only yesterday I had a scene drop to CPU with only 3 characters and all had been processed by Scene Optimizer to half-sized textures. The 3080 10GB card is only slightly better off for VRAM than my 1070 which, in my estimation, amounts to perhaps one character - so perahps I could squeeze 4 figures into a scene if I skimped on the props and environment. That's still an unwelcome restriction in my book.
RTX 2070 Super 8GB and drops to CPU very seldom, but I don't use environments that are resource heavy - First indication is the file size of the scene, the second is the amount of meshlights hidden in it, third the size and number of textures and maps and in some occasions also the UV mapping of the scene does have an effect.
With 8GB I can have 3 G8 figures with hair (don't like/use dForce), clothing, props and architecture, lit with 3 point lights (render option "Scene only"), and it will be rendered in 20 minutes to an hour without using any optimisation tools.
Using 5th gen i7 on Intel X99 chipset, 64GB RAM and 20+TB of storage space on SSD and USB HD
One thing to consider.
I got a 3090 a couple of weeks ago now; I can actually render more than one scene at the same time, if needed. Obviously it is slower for each scene, but a potentially useful feature. I've had Blender and Studio rendering at the same time too.
I can see me getting another card, either a 3080ti or another 3090; maybe even a 3080 if a 20GB ever actually appea
When you get the second card, be sure to run an instance of Blender on each GPU; I've found Cycles really does scale linearly, even with 4 GPUs. A nice additional speed bonus if you've got the system RAM for it, or a worthwhile upgrade if you don't.
I got the RTX 3080 with 10GIG and I am very happy with it.
What I also purchased was more RAM and a water cooler system.
I also got myself a new tower as my old one did overheat, hence the water cooling system.
Very happy with the performance of the RTX 3080, I have no complaints.
Would you like to comment on the kind of scenes you render? If they are portraits of single characters, for example, then it will never drop to CPU. If you have 4 or more characters plus hair, clothing, environment, architecture and props (i.e. not unusual for a real life scene), I'd be very surprised if 10 GB is enough.
As someone who has used a 12GB vid card for almost 2 years now, it's not enough to be reliable without always optimizing, and leaving this out, or lowering this subD etc. You'll always be fighting with it if you want freedom to add the bunches of great stuff you find in the stores and have it render at good quality. And hey, I throw out most of my normal maps for characters, which always incur a big expense. Mainly use bump & HD w subD 3.
Personally am not expecting 16-20GB to be enough either. Though it's alot better. 2x3090nvlinked with hopefully memory pooling working for textures should provide some room for freedom. And once you do that you are in uncharted waters of how much system RAM you need. IRAY ram usage is something that is very demanding. Find it actually quite frustrating. We are geting closer to more creative freedoms with less constraints but we're still a few update cycles away. More ambitious the plans, the further that is.
You need to render the characters on a greenscreen with shadows cast and then composite that with the background set(s).
I've read a little about compositing although have not come across the green screen method with relation to DAZ Studio renders - the advice seems to be to use the IRay canvas feature but I am not sure how yet. Any good tutorials on compositing would be welcome. I don't have Photoshop but I do have Affinity Photo which has lots of features in common with Photoshop (or I also have Gimp which I don't really like but will use at a push).
Otherwise, I have only seen green screen mentioned with relation to video. I use DaVinci Resolve (free version) as my video editor and I do very short, often looped animations. I'm not sure how to use the canvas system with that either and dealing with shadows for either stills or animations is astill a bit of a mystery to me.
Nevertheless, the point I was trying to make is that the vast majority of the VRAM seems to be taken up with character skin textures. In my experience, removing background objects in the scene saves only a small percentage of the overall VRAM in use. That's why I only bother to run Scene Optimizer on my characters - that's where the big saving are made.