NVidia Alternatives?
potter.roryquinn
Posts: 0
Hi,
So I'm somewhat of a new user her for Daz, but I have been experimenting on my iMac and even successfully recreated a character using meshes. But a friend told me everyone has moved over to PC, so I'm searching out a new PC. This same friend told me that Daz will not work on PC unless I use a NVidia graphics card. It is quite pricy, considering the PC I'm eyeing is $800 and the card alone is $380. Are there inexpensive alternatives to the NVidia graphics card, or is it do or die for this one?
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it really depends on how much you are putting into your scenes.
If it will fit on the Nvidia card VRAM yes it's the only choice.
If it is a complex scene that won't you might as well stick with your Mac if it has a good CPU.
Unless you intend buying a Nvidia card with lots of VRAM, anything under 6GB I wouldn't waste my money on.
TBH I wouldn't listen to them if that's what they're telling you because that's very misleading.
Nvidia cards allow you to use CUDA/RTX features to significantly cut down render times when using iray but it's not a requirement and using the CPU to render works like it always did. So you will be fine without one and if you're using 3DL, you wouldn't be using your graphics card to render in the first place.
Sadly now is a horrible time for graphics cards, the mining/scalpers/silicon shortages make getting a decent card at msrp impossible.
....for a long time I was rendering Iray on the CPU (Nehalem i7 930) as I had a GPU with only 1 GB, and it was excruciatingly slow. Even a simple character test render (with the character and an HDRI light set, no other geometry) took 25 - 40 min depending on clothing and hair content used. Full scenes could take upwards of 8 hours, or more (though not quite as bad as with Reality/Lux where I still had noticeable graininess after 15+ hours).
So depending on your CPU's clock speed and threads, pretty much be prepared to go off and do other things while the scene is rendering (or do so overnight). Performing other tasks while rendering will not only be slow, but will also extend the render time as well. (and you want to dedicate all your CPU's cores to rendering unless you have one of the high core count Gen 3 Threadrippers (which I don't think Apple supports).
It's exactly as Kyoto Kid says: you can render on PC without an NVidia GPU, but it's really terribly slow, I had very similar render times without NVidia GPU, including a scene I once let render for 24 hours, and it was still very grainy.
Even a 2060 RTX will make such a huge difference, that it's really worth it. If you can't afford getting a good rig right away, then I'd really suggest waiting for another month or two, try to save some more money, so you can hopefully afford a rig with NVidia GPU. Without, it really takes a lot of determination to keep rendering. You could try rendering in 3delight for a while, but fewer and fewer new products seem to come with proper materials for that, and even if products have proper materials set up for both, the resulting renders will be noticably different, to the point that if you're working on a series of renders, like a novel, there will be a very clear division visible at the point where you move from one renderer to the other.
Just like others have said... You can render on CPU but it will be slow, previously I was able to render 1 Iray image per day (over night), but when I got a RTX 2070 Super I can render in 15 minutes to maximum one hour depending on the scene.
I walked away from the hobby in 2018 due to not being able to upgrade to NVidia due to cryptocurrency-caused shortages. Built a new rig last fall with a RTX 2060 and it literally rocked my world. My productivity skyrocketed thanks to the NVidia preview and superfast renders. I suddenly understood what the Iray fuss was all about--especially in regard to environmental lighting and shaders. Iray had been all but unusable on my old system.
Last year I ended up with an MSI Nvidia GeForce GTX-1660 which has 6GB of VRAM and makes short work of moderately sized IRay scenes (One or two people with clothes. Or one person with clothes, body hair & architectural set) A newer card with at least 8 GB of VRAM would be better.
But of course at the moment, they're nearly impossible to find, much less at reasonable prices.
I want to get a 2070 or 2080 for my DAZ machine and move the 1660 to my other graphics machine which is hobbling along with only on-board motherboard graphics.
Either get a PC with a NVIDIA card of at least 8GB... or you might as well stick with your mac.
Everyone moving: not true.
Daz won't work: not true.
The first is a bit general, and depends on what they're talking about and a user's individual needs. If you want to use Studio (not Daz, but Daz Studio btw) it is a better experience due to their being less issues on a Windows based PC. How much this will change when some new 'stuff' is ready, I've no idea.
Studio works very well on AMD cards; Iray renders can run on CPU. If you want access to faster Iray renders then you need a Nvidia based card that is still supported. 900 series are above certainly are as I have a 980ti I use for monitors; I render on a 3000 series card. There are alternatives to rendering both in Studio and with Nvidia cards. Exporting to Blender and using an AMD GPU works well and is straightforward enough (with Deffeo plugin).
Just popping in to push back on the "you need the latest and greatest nvidia with 12 gb or why even bother" that always gets said in these threads.
A) it depends on what you render. If you typically render portraits (which is a lot of users) you're rarely going to even hit 4gb vram.
B) you can absolutely optimize more complex scenes. I have in the past managed to fit 2 characters, their clothes, strand hair, and scenery on a 2 gb card.
C) no gpu is going to make you a better artist. The only thing gpus do is make your renders go faster.
For the record I have a midrange laptop with a 1060 and what issues I have with the laptop have nothing to do with the gpu. But I'm also fine with doing overnight renders (even CPU iray is faster than when I tried doing scenes with Uber environment bounce light back in the 3delight days)
Yea that is probably true. However it is worth mentioning that using the built in 3DL pathtracer and wowie's free shading kit is generally more than 4 times faster than Iray on CPU.
I read elsewhere that DS 4.15 is in itself already so resource heavy that 4GB are not even enough to render one single G8.1 character. Cannot confirm, it's just what I read.
I wrote minimum 8GB in my post but 6GB might be enough, granted.
DS is somewhat resource heavy, yes, but that is more on the CPU. On the GPU, Daz Studio as a program is relatively light. It's purely all the stuff that you put into your scene that may tax the GPU, mostly depending on the materials you use. Use a lot of 4k textures, and you'll quickly fill the memory on your graphics card. Use only a handful of 512*512 textures, and re-use them between different figures where you can, and you can really cram a lot of assets into a single render.
...I have a Maxwell Titan-X running on an old P6-T MB with PCIe 2.0 slots, yeah a few generations old, but still a huge step up from CPU rendering.
...true.. I tend to create fairly involved scenes so more VRAM is necessary.
I'm still running 4.12. I just completed a scene with six G8 figures and one G2; extensive clothing kitbashing on each figure, two figures with strand hair, and background elements. Did primarily use shaders instead of texture maps. Would take about 30 seconds to load the NVidia preview; about 70 minutes to complete a render. This all with a RTX 2060.
As noted, it is all about what you want to render and if you're willing to settle for a diminishment in productivity. As I noted before, I walked away from the hobby three years ago because non-NVidia rendering became such a slog. I don't begrudge anyone still working with 3DL or CPU rendering, I was in that same boat too and I understand trying to make the best of it. But if you can manage to get a NVidia card (which I realize is a challenge right now), it's more than worth it.
Anyone who says you can't render the new G8.1 with 4 gigs of ram might want to retract that. I have a 15 yr old computer with an ATI Radeon HD 3400 series graphics card and 4 gig's of ram and can render any of the models currently out.
Also why is no one mentioning Filament and Octane which are suppose to help speed up render times.
...with a small amount of RAM, Iray rendering on CPU mode will dump to much slower swap mode (the "virtual memory" partition on the HD) when system memory is exceeded which is why the process can keep going.
Since going to subscription only, the free and monthly version of Octane requires you to be online while working. I shut down Net access as well as all other programmes, including a few processes (such my AV) while working in Daz to free up as much of my system's resources as I can.
Haven't messed with the Filamant engine (still on 4.12) but from what I gathered, it seems better suited to animation than still frame illustrations.
I think Filament is still Windows only but is looking more viable with RSSY's and Dreamlight's support for it - but not for Mac unless I've missed a big announcement
I dont know about that.
I use a PC with a GTX 1660TI 6GB, and I made an indoor scene a couple of months ago, complete with structure, livingroom furniture, plants, 8 characters, one ghostlight and 4 spotlights. It rendered in about 40 - 50 minutes (I`m guessing).
Although I want an RTX just for the heck of it, the 6GB has been fine and faster than my pervious GTX1060.
What's the difference between GTX and RTX?
Answering my own question:
That youtuve video only answered part of your question
From nVidia
"Fully interactive 3D rendering is now a reality with the beta release of Daz Studio 4.12. The powerful 3D scene creation and rendering application uses NVIDIA RTX and NVIDIA Iray to accelerate ray tracing."
"Using the Daz Studio 4.12 beta with RTX GPUs, users can experience up to 140 percent more performance in final frame rendering compared to previous generation GPUs, and an incredible 10.5x faster than CPU-only rendering."
Those RT and Tensor cores may not play a major role in gaming yet, but Daz Studio, since version 4.12 is already taking advantage of them.
Nice information about the DAZ relationship to the RTX models. But let's get down the really important question, which ones have the RGB lighting on them? I've still got dark spots in my computer's side window.
iMac works fine for Daz. It isn't the fastest thing but it is fine.
We have a very detailed benchmark thread in the forums that can help you determine exactly what you want speed wise. You can download the test scene for yourself and run it. Then you can compare your render times to that of others. If you have a Mac, you are CPU rendering, so I can pretty much guarantee you will see all the times posted in that thread will be much faster.
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/341041/daz-studio-iray-rendering-hardware-benchmarking/p1
There is some good info here, and it is indeed true that what you need for yourself just depends on what on you want to do. But I will add to this.
I will not talk about Mac, because what I would say is not very nice.
People love to say rendering speed will not make you a better artist. That is true...but not really true. What? It is like this, most people get better through repetition, correct? With pretty much any task you want to learn, we all get better with experience. Experience means you have to actually be doing that task. But if you have to wait for many hours just see a basic result of your image, then YES you are at a disadvantage against someone who can have a similar render in a few minutes. Because that person can quickly see what they did wrong in that render, make adjustments, and render again. And again. And again. And again.
They can do this many times over, while the other person might still be waiting on that one single image to render. I might make LOTS of test renders. Testing skin settings, light settings, does this pose clip, did dforce work, does expression 21 look better than expression 15? I might make dozens of renders for testing. Isn't that part of creativity? Being able to experiment and see the results? It would really, really suck if the test renders took hours, because I just wouldn't be able to do these tests as often, or at all. I have a full time job and family, I can't spend all that time waiting on my computer to render a single image. I might not even get an hour to sit down with Daz. I would never get anything done. I wouldn't even be here, I would have quit long ago. I started as a gamer, but as time went on I started upgrading for Daz Iray more than games. I actually owned a ATI GPU when I first started using Daz. And I felt the impact of not having a Nvidia card right away. So I jumped to ebay and bought a 670...this was when Iray first came out for Daz. I didn't have much money, and a 670 was an upgrade. Then I got a 970, and then I made the big move to a 1080ti. And then I got...another 1080ti, LOL.
Well that escalated quickly. But I bought every one of those used for far less than their original cost. I timed my 2nd 1080ti perfectly, when the 2018 crypto boom crashed. I got it for $450.
Are you really going to tell me that the person who has to wait for that image so long can improve at the same rate as the person with the faster computer? If we assume they have similar talent, hell no. Not even close. Don't even pretend they are the same. Imagine going to school and the history teacher can only give you a few sentences out the history book every day because the book cannot download fast enough. Sure...you can still learn the history but it is going to take a while. Meanwhile a classmate got to read the whole chapter, and tomorrow is a quiz! How is that fair? It is not, and neither is rendering.
This might sound extreme, but this is kind of an extreme field. The whole reason this field is so niche is because of how demanding it is on time and hardware. This field is absolutely not for the faint of heart. Daz can help make things pretty easy to get started, but it still requires a long learning curve. It is very hard to learn if you spend all your time waiting for the image to render.
Now, with that fun rant out of the way, you do have two considerations if you get a Nvidia GPU. Render speed is the obvious, but VRAM is the other. If your scene is larger than the VRAM, your GPU will do exactly NOTHING. While NOTHING might sound kind of metal, it is not so good for rendering. So how much VRAM you have is an absolute limit on what you can do. While some people have mentioned how many characters they can fit in a render, did they mention how large of a render they were making? Because that is a pretty major factor in VRAM, too. The higher the resolution of your render, the more VRAM needed. So if you desire making nice high resolution images, you might want more VRAM. Honestly, it is really hard to gauge just how much VRAM you will need. You might be able to guess by monitoring your CPU render scenes RAM usage. But how much RAM you use is not equal to how much VRAM you use. Iray actually compresses data when it sends it to VRAM, so your actual VRAM use will never match how much RAM you use. How much it is compressed can vary as well, depending on the scene, and Iray settings.
However, as you may have noticed, the prices of GPUs are high. In fact right now is the probably the worst time ever to be buying a GPU. I am not exaggerating when I say that. The market has never been like this. We have had crypto booms before, but not like this, and not during the perfect storm of COVID and supply shortages that rocked 2020. Not only are new GPUs highly inflated, but even old GPUs in the used market are absurdly inflated. The prices of many Pascal 1000 series cards, cards from 4 years ago, are higher than they were when they launched on ebay! If not higher, they are right at their launch price, when in normal times a 4 year old GPU that is 2 generations old should be at least half its original price at the very most. I don't know when this is going to end. You just have to hope the mining boom dies soon, and I don't see that happening. Of course I would love to be wrong!
So unfortunately I don't really have any good advice for you when it comes to Iray. It might be better to try using a different render engine. Daz includes 3Delight and Filament, which do not require Nvidia GPUs. You can also export to other applications now, like Blender. So you could export to Blender and use one of its render engines. Now do note that for any of these different engines you will need to adjust the shaders, and they are all different. Plus the very fast render engines are fast because they are less physically accurate than Iray, but maybe that is OK for you. So you do have some options. But just know that any render engine that uses CUDA and OptiX will require Nvidia because those are owned by Nvidia.
...another way that rendering power helps a is being able to use Nvida View Mode. On the CPU, forget it as any ttime you make a change viewport refresh is very sluggish.
I have a single Titan-X and while it takes a couple moments to refresh (as opposed to being excruciatingly slow using the CPU) it isn't as much a bother. Though I don't use ir for the full session I find it to still be good tool for setting up lighting as well as making adjustments to scenes and tonemapping without having to run repetitive test renders which further improves workflow.
This.
I really want a new 3000 series GPU, but the prices I see from 3rd parties are staggering. The only thing I can say with certainty about the mining/crypto boom is that when everyone says the price will continue going up and won't end soon, that's when the crash happens. It's always "unexpected" and when it happens it is monumental and staggering and catches seemingly everyone off guard. Meanwhile I remain on waiting lists for a new card with a couple of manufacturers--maybe I will get the email saying my turn in the queue has come. I am a little surprised by reports of shortages in the supply chain for the GPU components--from experience in a past life in a manufacturing industry when you have a product that has huge demand (look up the concept of Margin Over Variable Cost, or in laymans terms "if I had it today, I could sell it") you pull every stop imaginable to increase production to the max and then some. It seems to me that the GPU and VRAM manufacturers are doing the exact opposite right now and blaming things like COVID for unexpected disruptions to their supply chains--I don't buy that. The behaviour of NVidia and their suppliers are fishy to say the least, but what can I do? If their investors won't punish them for their missteps, then this type of behavior will continue.
When the crash does come (and it will), there will be a few winners, big winners, and there will be lots of losers, major losers. I believe it's the whole purpose of the game.
Kinda' like life really.
I've managed to use all RAM on my 3090 with just one figure.
It is possible to use a card with only 4; IMO, 10/11 is the minimum that Daz should recommend; this doesn't mean less can't be used, but what gives a better experience.
... I used all my RAM by leaving renders open - a great tool if the RAM is available.