Is 6GB of vram enough to get started? (GTX 1060 6GB)
I'm looking to get started with daz3D. I gather from reading the forums that with the newer versions some RTX features are emulated on GTX cpus which eats into their vram. I'm waiting for a "good" RTX 3060 price to turn up (or maybe even a RTX 2060 12GB) but until that happens all I have is my trusty 1060. Am I going to be able to use this for 1-2 figure scenes to learn things or is it going to constantly drop back to CPU? I've read a number of forum posts but again, it seems things have sort of changed over time.
Comments
Yeah, it's good enough to get you started and should be faster than CPU only renders.
I wouldn't use either of the denoisers though.They eat up too much VRAM.
You might get 1(maybe 2)character and a highly optimized scene on that GPU, but I don't think you'll get much more.There's just to much overhead emulating the RTX/tensor cores and of course the Windows display manager takes close to 1GB for itself.
It will be very easy to hit the VRAM limit on that card.So some practice using low VRAM techniques(like video games do) will come in handy.
What is your CPU, I ask as you will probably have scenes drop to CPU. I had that same card 4 years ago and was able to do simple one person scenes ok.
I have a Ryzen 3700x, so a decent but not crazy CPU. Honestly, it sounds pretty tight which is what I thought.
Would using a low end card as the display card reduce vram pressure for renders? How can I check vram usage in windows?
Task Manager will give you statistics in the Performance tab. However, most people use somethign like GPU-Z from Techpowerup for detailed reporting.
Windows will reserve soem space on the GPU for potential display connections, even if they are not used - this seems to have been reduced in recent updates though. If you have other applications using the GPU, for things other than display, and if they use the display GPU or can be told which GPU to use then a separate GPU might have more free-memory than oen that is handling the display but it does depend on your Windows version and the applicatiosn you have running.
Depends on what kind of image you're making. Portraits or non-forrested environments should be okay. Some highly detailed environments will crap out, of course. Start simple, which you will want to do as a beginner anyway, and work your way up to more complex scenes. Stay away from HD characters until you know whether or not your systenm can handle them.
I have a similar setup, with the 1060. Also with 32gb RAM.
I really don't have problems with complex scenes, any more than my other two machines with RTX 2070 (8gb), but it renders more slowly.