What hardware to look for in a studio rendering rig

oranda

Currently I am using a Mac with a 1 gb graohics card and 16mb of RAM.

iray preview takes 30 or so seconds to preview until I repose, and a single figure with no environments take 5-10 mins. Some more complex renders have take 2= hours and leads to a very hot mac.

What paricular features should I be looking for to reduce preview and rendering times, with Mac or Windows.

My budget is not unlimited within $2000-$3000. 

fred9803

A good NVIDIA GPU and a system that supports it. That will reduce your render times and make Iray preview more responsive. A GPU with six to eight GB of VRAM or more if you can afford it.

I have a MSI Trio Geforce Rtx 2080, three fans and it still gets hot, but never excessively hot.

kenshaw011267

iRay rendering is all about the VRAM and CUDA so getting the best, newest Nvidia GPU you can afford is key. For your price range if you want a prebuilt, desktop, I'd look for a 2080 Super in a "gaming" PC. If you're building yourself you should be able to squeeze a 2080ti out of the budget.

cajhin

Any PC with an RTX 2070 Super ($500) in it will utterly destroy your Mac. Like 10 minutes to 10 seconds. I just got one and I can't get over how awesome it is.

If the budget allows, 32GB or more system RAM is very nice to have. I'd like a simple 2nd card just to handle the display, so background renders don't impact the system as much. A fast SSD is nice for quick asset load times (but lots of free RAM are used as disk cache so matters only on first load). CPU isn't that important for DAZ.