Do you have to use a Nvidia Card to Render Iray?

antimity

I am looking at purchasing a new graphics card a found a great deal on a MSI Gaming Radeon Rx 5700. It is a newer card but not Nvidia and I have read other forums with similar queations and tend to find conflicting answers. 

Leana

If you want Iray to use your GPU then yes, you need a (recent) Nvidia card.

If you don't have one it will still render but with the CPU only, so much slower.

Ostadan

I say this a lot, but it bears repeating:  "Better; Faster; Cheaper: choose two."

Paintbox

To emphasize : IRAY will be *A LOT* slower without an Nvidia card, as in hours vs minutes, especially if you go beyond a very simple scene and low resolution.

Robinson

Yea it's not even close in terms of performance.  When I first started with Daz I had a Radeon (this was a while back).  The renders took hours (overnight).  Then I went to a GTX 970 NVIDIA and now I'm on an RTX 2070.  The difference in speed is a few orders of magnitude or thereabouts.

JamesJAB

For GPU based Iray rendering you need to have at least a Kepler generation Nvidia graphics card that has enough RAM on the card to fit the render job. (The more RAM on your videl card the more complex reders it will be able to handle)

The reccomended minimum is to have 6GB of RAM on your graphics card, though 8GB is a more realistic goal.
Here is a quick and dirty list of your best used/new options.

Used: (Roughly in order of render speed)
GTX 780 6GB
Geforce GTX Titan 6GB (also Black version)
GTX 1060 6GB
GTX 980ti 6GB
GTX Titan X 12GB
GTX 1070 8GB
GTX 1080 8GB
GTX 1080 ti 11GB
Titan X 12GB
Titan XP 12GB
Titan V 12GB

Current Generation: (Roughly in order of render speed)
GTX 1660 6GB
GTX 1660 Super 6GB
GTX 1660 ti 6GB
RTX 2060 6GB
RTX 2060 Super 8GB
RTX 2070 8GB
RTX 2070 Super 8GB
RTX 2080 8GB
RTX 2080 Super 8GB
RTX 2080 ti 11GB
Titan RTX 24GB