ISO Suggestions/Guidance - Purchasing New Computer
beanalexanderc
Posts: 2
Good evening all!
So a few months ago when I had the urge to dive into Daz I figured I'd stick with my crappy laptop, learn how to use the software, and then upgrade my computer if I actually stuck with it. Well, here I am, having stuck with it, and now I'm relatively adept and having a lot of fun! So now that I've demonstrated a little discipline to myself, I'm going to get a proper setup, and put and end to these eternal rendering times. I thought I should tap into the hive mind here and see if any of the veterans could point this newbie in the right direction.
Here's the important info: my budget ceiling is around $2000, though if I can avoid hitting that I'd sure like to. The only thing I will do on this machine that will tax it at all is use Daz Studio... I don't have much of a frame of reference on what to expect in terms of render times, since with my current setup I've been keeping my scenes rather dark to keep it under several hours. But I'll take a stab at it and say I'd love to be able to make nice-looking, well lit images in 10-15 minutes, if that's possible in my price range. I do tend to make complicated scenes with a lot of props and characters. Also, I well understand that I'll get better value with a desktop, and while I vastly prefer to work on a laptop, I will make that concession if achieving my goals on a laptop isn't really feasible.
Anyway I've tried to anticipate all the likely follow-up questions. Thanks for reading! Any suggestions regarding what to buy and where to buy it will be greatly appreciated. A happy new year to all!
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Comments
If you seach the forums for "new PC", "system advice" or "new system" you will get tones of threads with all kinds of info.
Bottom line is for Iray you will need the best nvidia GPU you can afford and more than 16 gig DDR and a good CPU and you should do fine with that budget. I would suggest a desktop ovet a notebook any day of the week.
Something to consider though, you can get 10-15 minute renders with a good system, but only with simple scenes. the more you add to a scene, the longer the render will take. Morphs, extra figures, textures, quality hair, lots of lights, HD morphs, all these take resources away and increase render times, or max out your VRAM on the GPU dropping the scene down to being rendered on the CPU which will take much longer.
There are many threads like that already.
But in short, the only thing to tace about are stem memory no less than 32 Gb and preferably 48 or 64
and as much GPU ram as possible 8GM is the bare minimum
CPU does not matter at all for Daz it is only a single-threaded application so it can use your CPU
and also 1080ti with 11GB will be better than new RTX cards that only have 8gb ram even if they will render faster
If you already have a PC just buy more ram and better GPU and keep the rest. this will give you way bigger performance boost than wasting money on stuff which has no effect on performance
This isn't true. Inevitably, you will want to do a scene too complex to fit in VRAM, in which case Iray will drop to CPU rendering. And it most definitely will make use of as many threads as it can. Furthermore, if you want to use 3Delight to do stylized renders, 3Delight will use as many CPU threads as it can. More CPU cores and more CPU threads most definitely will increase render speeds tremendously under many circumstances.
Furthermore, things like texture optimization and processing HDRI files happen in background threads while you continue working on your scene. So do things like mesh smoothing. So even when not rendering, Daz makes use of multiple threads.
BTW, it makes little sense to drop 64GB of memory into your system if the maximum scene size you can render in Iray using GPU is 8GB because your video card only has 8GB of VRAM. Again, if your scene is larger than 8GB, Iray will drop to CPU rendering. And if it does, the number of cores and threads your CPU can provide will make a huge difference in render time. 64GB of RAM is also major overkill for most users. 32GB works fine, and most people can get by with 16GB.
While I broadly agree with this, it is perhaps worth noting that the amount of RAm a working scene consumes is not directly tied to the amount of (hopefully GPU) RAM it consumes when rendering since the workign scene handles data, such as modifiers, that are baked down to a final mesh for rendering while the render gets the full-resolution textures - and of course the system RAM does need to handle both the working scene and the resultant render data in order to send it to Iray in the GPU.
Yes, but usually if it defaulted to CPU rendering, you better optimize your scene than try to render it on CPU.
Yes but again that's not so many threads and it is not happening frequently. The most annoying situation where you need some CPU performance is loading your scenes and figures
This process takes an insanely long time sometimes more than been rendering that same figure and it is done on a single thread.
All CPUs have at least 4 cores on this day and I didn't see Daz use more than 2 cores
Either way, CPU practically does not affect your work performance.
It depends on the way you work but I had scenes that costume over 30GB an and get rendered on 8GB GPU because many items in the scene are hidden
also most likely you will have like 30-50 chrome tabs open as well because you will be browsing the web while rendering is taking place or possibly you have another Daz instance open and working of something else while rendering is going. and probably there will be some other software launched too.
if you are swapping to SSD memory size it is not that critical but it is not that expensive to be so stingy at this time 16GB ddr4 price is below 50$ and it will affect your performance much more than CPU because it will take less time switching between applications.
If you are low on ram switching from browser to Daz may take quite some time or it may even happen that your system gets stuck
RAM is cheap. 32GB minimum, although 64GB is not expensive either and you can by a matching set that futureproofs your system for years to come.
Upgrading to 64GB from 32GB gave me a lot more responsive system when doing other things while DS was rendering.