Upgrading to a New Machine - Better Quality or Just Faster?
kocammy
Posts: 65
Hello
My old machine had an MX130 card in it with a whopping 2 GBs of memory and my machine had 16GB system memory. Because of my machine's specs I used 3Delight for a long time. I decided to switch to Iray and I've been happy with the results but my scenes are all simple - 1 or 2 charactes and I use a lot of HDRIs for the setting. Stiull my render times are really long even for simple scenes and all CPU.
I just ordered a new machine with an RTX 3080 card with 16GB memory and 32GB system memory. I know my render speeds will increase I hope dramatically, but will I also see an increase in quality? I'm hoping so. I'm excited to get the new machine because I think it will let me expeiriment and improve on my scene lighting - right now I can't really experiment because my render times are so long. The new machine I'm hoping will let me fail fast at least.
So I guess me question is in additon to a decrease in render times should I also expect an increase in quality from the new machine?
Thanks and Happy New Year
Cammy
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Comments
You won't see a change in quality unless you've dropped the render settings themselves down. My 3090 doesn't produce images any differently than my old 1080TI...just faster and I can fit bigger scenes on it.
If your previous IRAY renders were grainy because it just took too long to render them fully then yes, your new hardware will give better quality results.
Otherwise, in theory no, a CPU will render the exact same image as a GPU, just a lot slower.
But take it from someone who has recently-ish switched from CPU to GPU rendering, it makes all the difference! The quality of your work will improve, just because your workflow will become a lot less cumbersome and you can experiemnt a lot more.
I have a pretty high end rig with a RTX3070 in it and when doing scene renders with props/structures it still can take hours to get a high resolution render with good quality detail. It still feels a bit like playing a modern game on an ancient Commodore 64 lol. Iray really asks for 2 RTX3070's, because the 8Gb VRAM is not enough. When you go over the 8GB RAM then it jumps to CPU and that makes the render process even slower.
Thanks everyone! This is really helpful!!
My new RTX 3080 card in the new machine has 16GB VRAM - I think that should cover most of my scenes - I hope so anyway :)
Invest in the Render Studio 1.0, Render Studio 2.0, Render FX, and the 2 Example Scenes products for both the Render Studio products (for a total of 5 products) by the PA Colm Jackson and force yourself how to use them since you soon will have a RTX 3080 is about the easiest & best advice I can give you. Avoid faces completely lit or completely in shadows for the majority of your scene but go for faces part in shadow and part in shade. One thing I can't advice on is what if any post filter processing in external program to your finished renders. Look at the most popular in the DAZ Gallery and ask tthe most popular there. Or ask "Serene Night" (SereneNight) in this thread SereneNight’s Sci-Fi Fun Thread 3 - Page 32 - Daz 3D Forums. She is good with post processing.
That sounds great... can you point me to where you found a RTX 3080 with 16GB VRAM?
Thank You.
I suspect you won't see any qualitative improvements on the new machine, only quantitative improvements (speed mostly). According to your own post, the issue seems to be your lighting techniques, and your current 16 GB + 2 GB VRAM setup should allow for a wide variety of lighting schemes, especially if you're mostly rendering 1-2 figures in a relatively minimalist or sparsely furnished environment without a lot of complex geometry and reflections from the non-human objects.
Have you been limiting your render times in Iray using the Max Time or Max Samples settings? I limit my test renders for 1-2 figures to 5 minutes or 300 samples--Plenty long enough for me to identify issues and problems. Running for an hour isn't likely to show me anything I haven't identified in a 5 min. test.
(I'm not suggesting that the new rig won't be a big help--faster load times for content, easier manipulation of content, more figures and more complex environments, easier to use Iray in the viewport, etc.--All useful.)
The laptop version of the RTX 3080 has 16GB VRAM. I recently bought one and am very pleased with it.