PC upgrade for animation
bobety316_c50224ad1f
Posts: 75
in The Commons
Hi, with my current setup I can get a quality animation that I am happy with at about 2mins per frame. I am wondering what sort of PC upgrade would make a significant reduction in that render time at the lowest cost.
My current specs are
11th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-11400F @ 2.60GHz 2.59 GHz
16.0 GB (15.9 GB usable)
64-bit operating system, x64-based processor
nvidia geforce rtx 3060 8g ram
Thanks
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First I would confirm your renders are being handled 100% by your GPU and that your CPU is not involved. By default Daz enables BOTH CPU and GPU when you really should only use your GPU. If your CPU is involved in rendering, it will signifigantly increase rendering times. One way to find out if your GPU is doing all the work is to open your task manager, click performance, and highlight the GPU section. What you want to see is once the actual frame is rendering, the GPU is running at 100% while your CPU is around 0-30%. If you see CPU at 100% and GPU closer to 0%, thats no good. If you have both CPU and GPU at 100%, thats also not good. Make sure you only measure this during the actual render, not while its loading and preparring the render. I would also verify the following settings in Daz Studio:
Render Settings -> Advanced (Make sure CPU is unchecked in the devices section and disable "Allow CPU Fallback".
If you have CPU fallback disabled and you get a black screen on your render, that means your scene is exceeding the VRAM available on your GPU. You can turn Allow CPU Fallback back on to avoid the black screen, but this will mean your CPU is doing the work. Having that black screen is a good warning that you are not rendering on your GPU properly. In that case, the primary upgrade I would do is getting a graphics card with 16-24GB VRAM, and next I would double your system RAM from 16GB to 32GB to support that increased VRAM.
If your CPU was never involved with renders in the first place, then I would still focus on getting a faster GPU as the primary upgrade to start as that is what handles most of the work during renders. Focus on the GPU, and build around that. I recommend you purchase a GPU from a place like Best Buy which has a 30 day return policy and just see if it solves your problem. You can also try this approach from Best Buy and experiement with other hardware upgrades to see what actually makes a difference with the option to return the hardware if you notice no difference.
While upgrading the GPU is not the lowest cost, it should be the primary hardware upgrade to notice a signifigant reduction in render times. Bbefore upgrading hardware, I would veryify you are first properly rendering on your GPU as mentioned above first.
Just to be sure, I assume you are rendering with Iray in Daz Studio. If that is the case, you want the fastest GPU you can grab. A 3060 isn't bad, but you can do better.
Without any idea of what you are doing, it is hard to make a suggestion. Do you have enough memory? I wouldn't think 16gb of RAM would be enough for most people today. But I am not you. Your scenes must be pretty light to only take 2 minutes per frame.
You have all kinds of options. One of the easiest things to do is add a second 3060 to your system. That would mostly double your speed. If you replace your 3060, you would need quite a lot to get a doubling of performance. Like if you replaced your 3060 with a 3080, that might not double your performance. A 3090 would. A 4070 will be close, and anything above a 4070 would double it or more.
That is a beauty of render engines like this. You can use multiple GPUs instead of just one. This lets you get huge performance boosts. It is a good idea to try to match your 3060's VRAM capacity, you don't have to, but each GPU has to be able to fit the scene into its own VRAM. So if you bought a 6gb GPU for some reason, any scene over 6gb would not render on it, making it useless. So a second 3060 is logical, as both cards have 12gb.
Though at this time, you probably cannot actually use all 12gb of VRAM since your system has 16gb of RAM.
But anyway, you have lots of ways you can tackle this to go faster.
I never thought of adding a new gpu to work alongside my current one. That's a great idea! So if I get the same one as I have now it would perhaps double the performence? Could you explain again what changes I would need to make to my pc to get the full benefit? Many thanks.
Thanks, yes I only use gpu to render. I live in the uk so best buy is not an option. Thanks for taking the time though :)
Here's the most important question - what's your budget?! The cheapest option to speed up your animations may not be the most cost effective in £ per unit of time if that makes sense but like most people you'll have a limit on what you want to spend. What is it?
Second most important question - what kind of renders do you do? Is it animations of single figures in simple scenes or complex scenes with many figures in a highly detailed environment? Combination of both?
As it stands your 16GB of system RAM reallly isn't enough even for a 12GB RTX 3060. 32GB is what I would recommend as a minimum.
If all of your renders currently fit into your 3060's VRAM and you just want to increase the speed, get a 4060 and install it as a standalone card not connected to any monitors. Not a 3060. This is not SLI - you can use two different cards for rendering and the 4060 is much, much quicker than the 3060 for roughly the same money. If you can afford it, the 4070 will be even quicker, as will the 4080 which has 16GB of VRAM (which would really need 64GB of system RAM)..
Don't get another 3060; it's £10 - £15 more for a much more efficient and much quicker Lovelace generation RTX 4060. If you want to do this as cheaply as possible you'll more than double your speed with a 4060. Choosing a 4xxx series card better than the 4060 will improve your speed further but at a considerable increase in cost and the improvement in render times per £ will drop off considerably.
You do need to do something about your system RAM as well though!
Yes, a 2nd 3060 would basically double your speed. It doesn't scale quite perfectly, but it would be close. You can use any combination of GPUs, it doesn't have to be the same card. But my thinking is that it is a good idea to match the VRAM spec. Sure you could get a 4060 and probably not care about it having 8gb of VRAM. Given your current spec, it is very unlikely you are using all 12gb of your 3060, so getting a 8gb card may not be a big deal.
But I like to try thinking forward. Do you plan on doing these same animations for long, or might you step up the complexity a bit and use more memory in the future? At some point it would be good to double up your system RAM, and at that point, you will begin to appreciate having 12gb of VRAM on your 3060. But if you bought a 4060, you might not be too happy with it long term if you start running out of VRAM.
But again, that is for you to decide. This is the most important step, and only you can say what your goals are. The amount of memory you need is the first thing you need to consider, and then look at your options. I just mentioned a 2nd 3060 because that would be the cheapest option that maintains 12gb of VRAM. You can do it however you want. You could a 3080 12gb for example, or a 4070 12gb. Or you could just get a 4060, as that would be faster than a 3060, at least until it runs out of VRAM.
Regardless of what you do, if wish to add a 2nd GPU to your system, you just need to make sure your system can handle a 2nd GPU. If you bought a pre built system, there is a chance it may not be built to handle more than one GPU.
-Your motherboard needs a 2nd slot that can physically fit a 2nd GPU.
-Your power supply needs to have enough connector cables, and it must have enough total Wattage to support everything in the PC. You can use PC power calculator websites to get a estimate on how much you may need.
-Your case ideally needs to be able to fit this 2nd card as well, and needs to be able to provide both GPUs with enough air to keep them cool.
You need all of these things to be able to do this. The good news is a lot of PCs can, unless they are cheap. The 3060 is not a very power hungry card, and that helps a lot, because a 2nd 3060 is not a huge deal for most PCs. Many 3060s only use one 8 pin power cable, so many power supplies can handle a 2nd one. But a number of pre built PCs by certain companies throw wrenches here, as they might not have any expandability in them.