Upgrading Hardware: Is VRAM the Most Important? Brute Force Matters?

tcassat

Hello!

I know this must have been discussed a lot already, but the search system on this forum isn't the best and I couldn't find any answers.

Basically: my current GPU only has 8GB of VRAM and this is quite annoying for some scenes, making working in DAZ Studio at the limit of tolerable...

I've been looking at some alternatives, and I came up with something like this:

1. RTX 3070 8GB (my GPU)
2. RTX 4060ti 16 GB (performance more or less comparable to my GPU, but double the VRAM)
3. RTX 4090 24 GB (much better than my GPU in every way)

The RTX 4060ti is being sold for 1/3 the price of the RTX4090 and its 16GB of VRAM will be enough for my use of DAZ Studio. In theory, it will work well for me. However, the RTX4090 is MUCH more powerful than the 4060ti, with the disadvantage that it is 3x more expensive (in my country). Does this difference in brute force justify a higher investment? Or, once I have the VRAM I need, I don't have to worry too much, and the extra brute force of the RTX4090 can be considered a dispensable "luxury" or something?

Could anyone with experience with a similar case tell me what you think?

Thanks.

Richard Haseltine

What matters first is that you have enough VRAM for your scenes, if you do then more will be only an occasional benefit (should you render a larger scene). After that power matters, as it makes rendering faster - but how much it matters depends on how long your renders take (if you aren't pacing up and down waiting for them to finish then the extra speed will be less important than if waiting fror enders keeps blocking you from doing other things).

Mattymanx

Here is a benchmark comparison between the two cards

https://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Nvidia-RTX-4090-vs-Nvidia-RTX-4060-Ti/4136vs4149

TheKD

4090 is a beast, make sure you got a huge case though, the thing is massive. I got a big full tower, it fits with like 1mm in between the card and my drive bay. I had to take out my CPU cooler and my PSU just to be able to angle the thing in there.

tcassat

Richard Haseltine said:

What matters first is that you have enough VRAM for your scenes, if you do then more will be only an occasional benefit (should you render a larger scene). After that power matters, as it makes rendering faster - but how much it matters depends on how long your renders take (if you aren't pacing up and down waiting for them to finish then the extra speed will be less important than if waiting fror enders keeps blocking you from doing other things).

 I'm using very aggressive denoiser filters, so even on my RTX3070, I rarely take more than 10 minutes for each render. However, in some cases (when there are water surfaces, mirrors, etc.) the final image quality is very affected. Even so, working with my RTX3070 is proving to be a rather unpleasant experience, not only because of the low VRAM that forces me to optimize each scene and close/open Daz Studio several times before finally rendering, but also to check things in the viewport, I often end up rendering kind of blindly praying that the final result is acceptable, and perhaps a GPU like the RTX4090 would make my life much easier when I'm adjusting things in the viewport and looking at previews with iray.

 

 

tcassat

TheKD said:

4090 is a beast, make sure you got a huge case though, the thing is massive. I got a big full tower, it fits with like 1mm in between the card and my drive bay. I had to take out my CPU cooler and my PSU just to be able to angle the thing in there.

This is something that worries me. For example, my case accepts GPUs up to 370mm long, and the RTX4090 I'm interested in is 355mm. However, I've seen people saying that I need to add 20mm because of cables and other things, so theoretically, the case will be 5mm short.
It's frustrating how difficult it is to get concrete information about this, I think the only way is to have the GPU in hand and test it in my case... 

TheKD

 

I had to pop my side off today, so grabbed some pictures. I had no other place to route my wires that go above the GPU but in front of the gpu lol. It's massive n prettymuch all directions, height, width and depth.

mikael-aronsson

I found a cheap used 3090, good performance and you get the 24 gigs ram, if you can find one at a good price I think it's a better choice than the 4090, but of course the 4090 is faster and you can do bbq on it.

tcassat

mikael-aronsson said:

I found a cheap used 3090, good performance and you get the 24 gigs ram, if you can find one at a good price I think it's a better choice than the 4090, but of course the 4090 is faster and you can do bbq on it.

I wasn't considering the RTX3090 because for some reason, in my country, the RTX4090s are cheaper. However... I've just found an RTX3090 being sold on Amazon at a lower price. I'm now seriously considering it over the other options, even though from what I've seen, it's sometimes vastly outperformed by the RTX4090 in render times.

And TheKD, thanks for the phtoos.

mwasielewski1990

tcassat said:

mikael-aronsson said:

I found a cheap used 3090, good performance and you get the 24 gigs ram, if you can find one at a good price I think it's a better choice than the 4090, but of course the 4090 is faster and you can do bbq on it.

I wasn't considering the RTX3090 because for some reason, in my country, the RTX4090s are cheaper. However... I've just found an RTX3090 being sold on Amazon at a lower price. I'm now seriously considering it over the other options, even though from what I've seen, it's sometimes vastly outperformed by the RTX4090 in render times.

And TheKD, thanks for the phtoos.

Grab the 4090. Period. Even if you don't need the VRAM+Raw power now, you WILL need it later, some time down the line. Even using just 2-3 HD characters with SubD 4-5, dforce hair, plus a high quality enviroment with 4k/8k textures I'm easily hitting 12-18GB usage on my 4090 when I render in 3840x2160px resolution. 8GB is a joke, 12GB seemed like much maybe 4 years ago. 16GB is barely enough if you really go for quality characters, simulated hair, etc. The 24GB is a nice "safety buffer", in my opinion.

Plus, remember that 4090 will get even faster. Right now, DAZ does not even have the 2023 version of Iray renderer implemented (so not fully optimized for 40xx), and 4090 is already 50% faster than the 3090. 

Or, as someone else stated, get the 3090, but watch out for units from China. There is an absurd mass of crappy 3090's from china that were sitting in bad conditions (damp rooms with mold, etc), I've even seen videos where crypto miners literally cleaned the GPU racks with WATER.

So... Bargain hunting? Yes, just be aware of the risk.

And yeah, definitely check both the max length and how much clearance you have after closing the side panel of your PC case. 4090's are THICCCC.

eeyun

If you use the denoiser filter (which IMHO works just fine in most cases - and especially previews) then I think the benchmark iterations per second figure isn't actually super important.

YMMV, but I typically stop rendering after about 40 iterations for a preview. I tried a scene that took ~10G VRAM and roughly half of my "render" time is taken up by loading the scene data into the card - which is limited by your PCI bus speed, not your graphics card. I've just moved from a 1080 Ti (12GB) to a 4060 Ti (16GB) - opening that scene fresh in DS (no pre-load), then my total time from hitting render till ~40 iterations went from 1m 07s to 0m 55s, of which about 30s was spent loading the card.

The 4090 is signiicantly faster than the 4060 - but 3x the cost is only going to save you a few tens of seconds for this use case, max. (I would have also had the added cost of a new PSU as mine only had two 6+2 graphics power adapters)

I also didn't have a pressing need for 24GB vs 16GB, so the 4060 was an easy choice.