Upgrading my PC
Hi
I've been lurking for a while now having "tinkered" with DAZ on an off but my PC was never really up to the task so I never really stuck with it, however I have now aquired a pre-owned PC with an intel i7 CPU and I've upgraded the RAM to 12gb, graphics card is an Nvidia GTX480 which I understand is 1.5gb
DAZ now seems to perform much better than on my old machine but after trying out a few renders and been unhappy with the results I experimented with changing the render settings, I can get a decent reasonably noise free iray render using a pixel height of 1800 with a max time of 25000 seconds and a render quality of 6 then leaving it overnight, I should add that I'm thinking of been able to produce decent A3 prints, hence the pixel size.
Bottom line really is what improvement in Graphics Card would speed up renders significantly, budget would be a maximum of £150, sorry if that confuses members on the other side of the pond. For instance, would a 3gb graphics card halve the render time of my current 1.5gb card?
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Comments
Have you checked the driver ?
I've a pair of GTX 750 cards, but the 'out of box' driver is optimised for gaming. I had to hunt on NVIDIA's site for their 'general purpose' driver. Much better for non-game graphics, it also let Win'10 recognise the second card, drive my third screen...
To utilize your graphics card in Iray you need at least 4GB of VRAM on the card. If you don't the rendering is dependent on your CPU. 12GB of system RAM is adequate for a decent sized scene. If your getting a lot of noise try increasing your iterations. It will increase render time a bit but it will get rid of that noise. A GPU that only has 1.5GB of VRAM is serving no purpose in Iray. You should be able to find a card with 4GB of VRAM with your budget, maybe a bit more but it is doable.
Thanks for the replys
Driver is up to date but probably is optimised for gaming (which I do use the PC for as well)
Not too much trouble with noise, just the render times been too long, also the fact the PC become virtually unusable.
And it is a 4gb card I'm considering although I may hang on till after xmas and see if anything bigger comes up in the January sales.
Can I trouble you helpful folk with one more question, how does the speed/size of the Graphics cards interface (bitrate) affect rendering time.
Having done some more digging I find my current 1.5gb card is actually 384bit, The 4gb card I was thinking of buying is only 124bit, the only website I could find to do a comparison was aimed at gamers and the 4gb card didn't seem that much better than what I already have.
I don't want to splash out £150+ to find very little difference in performance.
Just out of interest where are you able to find a nvidia 4gb card for under £200 mine cost well over that but if I can find another one cheaper I may get that as well.
@ Scorpio: try CCL in Bradford, they currently have a few 4gb cards under £150
1.5GB vs 4GB is where the difference is. A fully clothed Genesis with hair, plus a bit of a scene will easily get you 2GB worth of data, and that means that your card won't render it, and you are back to CPU.
So you'd perhaps get the same performance on a single person render, but as soon as you put in more than naked Vicky in a temple with a sword, you get back to crawling speed CPU.
Thanks. I'm not sure if it would make that much difference to add another one or not, or even if its worth it my computer is getting pretty old now. I will have to look into it.
"1.5GB vs 4GB is where the difference is. A fully clothed Genesis with hair, plus a bit of a scene will easily get you 2GB worth of data, and that means that your card won't render it, and you are back to CPU.
So you'd perhaps get the same performance on a single person render, but as soon as you put in more than naked Vicky in a temple with a sword, you get back to crawling speed CPU."
As the majority of my renders have been a single figure it seems I may be best keeping the card I have and leaving them to complete overnight, I suppose by the time I get round to more complex renders the price of current cards will have come down and I could possible get something even better for the same price.