NVidia Graphics Cards vs. Other Brand Graphics Cards?
Gemini Queen
Posts: 263
I was watching an information video about Daz3D earlier, and one of the things that the guy mentioned that in order to get fast renders, you have to use an NVidia graphics card. He also mentioned that without it, it doesn't matter how good the one you have is, your renders will take a long time and won't be of the same quality. Honestly, I disagree with this, considering that my renders have come out beutifully, and when I'm not low on RAM, they come out within 5-15 minutes. Though I wanted to know if there was any merrit to this. Within the near future, I'm going to be upgrading my PC with a newer/bigger/double fan, better graphics card, 16 GB of RAM, and more storage (preferrably around 400-500 GB).
I thought that by just getting double the RAM that I have now and a better graphics card then what I have now, then I would be fine to do heavier renders in a shorter amount of time with less grain. But is there really a big difference between an NVidia graphics card vs. any other name brand graphics card?
PS. I'm not sure exactly which one I'm getting or what the other brands are. I'm going out to the best buy and letting the geek squad tell me what it is that I need.
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The short answer is it depends. The longer answer is it depends on what kind of scenes you tend to do. For scenes with only a couple of close up characters (portrait shots, scenes where the main focus is on two characters and there's very little or very simple scenery, etc.)? Then yes, an NVidia card will make a difference because Iray can use GPU rendering. On AMD cards, it cannot. (Daz has two renderers btw: Iray and 3Delight. If you are using 3Delight, then it won't matter either way because 3Delight doesn't use GPU rendering anyway. If you haven't messed with the render settings, you are using Iray.)
If, however, you tend to do large fantasy type scenes with detailed landscapes, lots of characters and so on? Then an NVidia card will make less of a difference. For GPU rendering to work, the entire scene has to fit in your video card's memory (VRAM). And unless you can afford to spend upwards of $800 on a video card, it probably won't all fit. In that case, Iray will drop to CPU rendering anyway and the speed of your processor will factor much more into rendering speed than the speed of your video card will.
As far as rendering quality, grain, etc. It is not true that an NVidia card will give you better renders. But it is true that it will take less time to render to the same quality level than a CPU only render (assuming, again, that your entire scene can fit in VRAM.) With Iray, a render is never actually finished. It just stops when you've achieved an acceptable level of quality. And of course, the longer the render runs, the less change you will see on each render pass, so eventually, it becomes pointless to let it run any longer and try to get better results.
Your other main option is an AMD Radeon card. Decent ones are significantly cheaper than decent NVidia cards, but they won't be able to make use of GPU rendering like NVidia cards will. But again, you need a fairly high-end NVidia card for it to matter. And for some types of scenes, the amount of VRAM required is higher than most people can afford unless they got commercial company paying for their hardware.
P.S. I wouldn't puch much faith in Geek Squad here. Most Geek Squad employees probably aren't going to be familiar with path tracing and 3D art. A card that will work well for a gamer might not be suitable for rendering depending what you are trying to achieve.
Depends on if you are rendering in Iray or 3dl.
Freightliner Fox - Thanks so much for this! The types of scenes that I'll be rendering are a broad range from basic portraits and such to full on fantasy and steampunk. So I guess I'll just ask the people at Best Buy for the cheapest graphics card that's better than the one that I have right now. If I'm not mistaken, all my renders up to this point have been Iray, but I didn't even know what 3Delight is (this is why I'm watching informational videos). Is 3Delight a faster/smoother render than Iray? I'm sure that I'll learn this more as I read and watch. I'll bring up the VRAM up to Best Buy as well (again, something that I'm not entirely familiar with, but I'm sure Youtube has plenty of videos to explain.) And based on what you're saying about the NVidia graphics cards costing upwards of almost $1k, it sounds like I'm just better of getting something for about $150 - $250 from Best Buy/Amazon. Also, what is the difference between GPU rendering and CPU rendering? I've looked at the render settings a couple of times, and I've seen it there, but I've never touched the settings in fear that I might mess something up.
scorpio - Considering that I haven't messed with most of the render settings, I would assume the default is Iray and that's the one that I'm using.
Iray vs 3DL is like a photograph compared to a drawn comic.
Your renders take 5-15 minutes, which sounds very fast (too fast) to render "full fantasy and steampunk" scenes in IRAY unless a fast NVIDIA RTX card is used.
What are you current system specs (processor, amount of RAM, current GPU?), do you use Genesis 8 or some olders generations for characters and how large do you render (width x height in pixels)?
In that case, if it were me, I'd get an AMD card. You aren't going to find any NVidia cards in that price range that are going to be of much benefit for GPU rendering. If you do decide to go NVidia, you might want to hold off a bit. They were popular holiday gifts so the stock is kind of low and you'll fine some price gouging going on right now.
As far as the difference between CPU and GPU rendering, the processor in your graphics card is optimized for graphics processing, so it can be more efficient to render with the graphics card processor than with your computer's processor. This can also free up your CPU for doing other tasks. But again, if you are looking to stay in the under $300 price range, you aren't going to find an NVidia card that will be of much benefit for GPU rendering. One of the problems with Iray's GPU rendering is that it requires some pretty expensive hardware to really make good use of it.
VRAM is the amount of video memory on your video card (not to be confused with the amount of RAM in your computer). For Iray rendering, with an NVidia card, you'll probably want a card with 8Gb of VRAM, althoguh you might get by with 6Gb. But you won't find one with even 6 much less 8 in the price range you are looking at.
Iray and 3Delight are basically completely different animals. Iray is unbiased (it models how light behaves in the real world) where as 3Delight is biased (it doesn't provide physically accurate lighting.) in the real world, for example, light hits an object and bounces off. This is how a single light bulb can light an entire room. Iray models this accurately. in 3Delight, there is no bounce lighting, So for example, in 3Delight, if you put a spot light in a room and aim it at the floor, it will only light the part of the floor that the light hits. The rest of the room will be completely dark. To get bounce lighting, you have to simulate it by adding more lights, and / or using an environment light (like UberEnvironment, or Advanced Ambient Light.)
This doesn't mean that Iray is automatically better than 3Delight, though. Although it's easier to achieve photorealism in Iray than in 3Delight because Iray models real light behavior, 3Delight gives you much more control over how light interacts with your scene, which is what you want for stylized renders. It's also also possible to achieve near photorealism in 3Delight, but it requires more work on the light setup, and more practice. Also, most newer content in the Daz store only comes with 3Delight shaders and materials, which you will have to convert to 3Delight, which also means more work if you use 3Delight.
Again, neither renderer is better than the other. Which one to use really depends on the effect you are trying to get. However, the good part about 3Delight is that it doesn't require a high end NVidia graphics card to achieve good results in reasonable time.
That's not really true. You can achieve near photorealism with 3DL. But it requires more work and practice to get there.
It depends on the size you are rendering at and the type of scene. I don't have an NVIDIA card, but some of my outdoor scenes still render in less than 10 minutes at 1280x720 in Iray. Outdoor scenes often render fairly quickly because there isn't a lot of bounce lighting and the lighting is often pretty simple. Often just an environment light and a sunlight, or sometimes only an environment light. There also usually aren't any windows or other such materials that slow down Iray while it calculates how light will pass through that object.
Had to look it up on Google to find out what I had, but, this is what my computer is currently running:
I use Genesis 8 all the time, but on a rare occasion, I might us Genesis 3. I'm not sure where to measure the pixels of my images.
In the future, I'll get renders that have the effects that I'm looking for and try to use those as the "base" of what I should buy. Thanks for being so thorough!
~ look under Window > Panes > Render Settings
I'm sorry to derail this thread, but I saw this just now. I just want to point out that this is not true. 3DL certainly has true physically accurate bounce light. For your information 3DL has a built in pathtracer. Had it long before the introduction of IRay in DS. You access it via scripted rendering.
It does, yes. But 3Delight's global illumination is insanely slow in my experience, at least in Daz. I've never played with the standalone 3DL renderer, and unfortunately, I don't think it's available anymore.
And yes, it does kind of derail the thread. I think the average new user is not going to be messing around with scripted rendering and will either be using Iray or 3Delight as it comes out of the box.
iRay is a Nvidia thing, so you need an Nvidia card for iray... otherwise you are Rendering with CPU and then it becomes a time issue.
I saw a "rule of thumb" post here (can't find) but it was basically each character (G8) rendered with Iray takes about 2-3gb... so a 6GB card like your 1660 could do maybe 3 characters and a simple scene before overloading your GPU and going to your CPU.
Honestly, Its a crappy time to be upgrading your Graphics Card. Yes, some awesome/amazing cards from both Nvidia and AMD have dropped in the last few months... but supply is very low and its a dog fight for the common folks to get their hands on one. And the older versions 20XX haven't come down enough to be in the price range you are looking for (unless maybe you go used via ebay?)
If you are 'relatively" happy with your current 1660, then I would march on with that, and save a little each month with a target of June-ish to get a new card. By then you might be able to get a RTX 3060/3070 in the $400 range.
Seriously, I don't think there is much available in the $150-$250 range that will allow you to Render iRay on GPU with Daz and is going to be a worthwhile upgrade to your GTX 1660 right now....
If I am wrong, please show me the light.
You are absolutely right, especially when it comes to the NVidia cards. They were popular over the holidays and stock is low right now. There's a fair amount of price gouging going on right now.
Who says you have to buy a new graphics card? It's end of the year, people are selling off their old cards on Ebay.
You can get a 8GB GTX 1080 for less than $250. Most people paid $700 or more when they bought it new.
Be careful if you do that. Believe it or not, there are companies out there producing counterfeit Nvidia cards that appear to be a GTX 1080 for example, but are actually using much older and slower chipsets. So basically, buyer beware. If you find something on Ebay that looks too good to be true? It probably is.
So I finally got to Best Buy today, and took it to them to ask them about what I needed to better my computer. I brought up some of what you guys said about it, and this is what they told me to get and in what order:
So in total, it's looking like it'll be around $539 for all the parts and installation before tax. I did ask about the graphics card, and they said the 1660 was actually pretty decent and that with upgrading the RAM and CPU, there isn't much of a reason to upgrade the graphics card yet.
The 1660 is not a bad GPU, but it isn't especially good for iray - it has only 6GB of memory, and about 1GB of that is going to be eaten by the code emulating the RTX features of swankier cards, so it is not going to leave an enormous amount of head room. You should be able to do some rendering with it, though, and it is reasonably fast (or at least, my 1660 Super is) when scenes fit.
I'd get two 8 GB instead of one 16 GB. If you only get one 16 your system can't use dual-channel access. Dual-channel access makes reading and writing to memory faster.
If your existing motherboard can handle the i7-9700K, go for it. But if you have to get a new motherboard, I'd consider one of the AMD Ryzen CPUs instead.
As long as the fan has a TDP (thermal dissipation rating) at least as high as your CPU requires, you should be fine. I personally like the Noctua fans. The NH-U14 is really nice. They are a little pricey, but they are very quiet. Just make sure it will fit in your case as the heatsink is pretty large.
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