Can I pair a Threadripper 3960x with an RTX 3070?

JCarver

Hey everybody! I'm about to build my very first computer and I have Daz Studio to thank for inspiring me!

I had decided money was no object and that I'd go all out and build a "supercomputer," but I have a few hangups. I feel like I'm getting a lot of "mixed" or "diluted" messages (I guess) because the market is drenched in "gamer" stuff, and I understand that artists have different computer needs than gamers. So I'm hoping someone can clarify what would be best for me.

As it is 2021, the graphics cards are in shortage and very inflated. I would have reached for the stars and got a 3090 for my supercomputer, but even I, someone who loves spending money, feels $3000+ is just too much (maybe I do have a budget after all lol). And I can hardly even find them in stock for that matter. What I was able to get was an RTX 3070. It was the best I could do in this year, and I know it will be a huge upgrade for me because I've been in the habit all my life of buying HP Pavilions for $300-400. I know my new pc will change my life.

So now I need a CPU and had decided to get a Threadripper 3960x because I heard it was ideal for rendering. Yes, I've also heard that Daz Studio will render with the GPU, but this is more mixed messages and lack of Daz-specific clarification I've been suffering with (is it Blender that uses the CPU???) Anyway!

For a while, I was secure in my decision and I'm now saving my money for the threadripper. But last night, I saw on the bottleneck calculator site that my pairing choice would bottleneck at 11% and the site told me that was bad (I wouldn't know otherwise, because I'm new to all this). 

Heres a few points that may help you help me:

I'm NOT a gamer! I will be using my new pc for Daz, Marvelous Designer, an old Adobe Indesign, Corel Paintshop, just a little bit of video editiing, maybe music sofware, and probably Adobe Illustrator and Corel Painter.

I basically have no budget as I can save my money for each part and I love spending money lol. So I'm very happy to buy the threadripper 3960x IF it can work well with a gpu 3070 and make my pc miraculously fast. If not, I can consider a Ryzen 9 or something else. Should I get a second 3070 to keep up with the threadripper?

Just let me know if pairing a threadripper 3960 with a gpu 3070 will be an issue. Any other suggestion is welcome. I can change my mind on anything but the GPU I was blessed to be able to buy lol. Thanks!

Richard Haseltine

The 3070 is prsumably with 8GB? As long as the scene fits into that it should be faster than a CPU render, but if your render drops to CPU the Threadripper may well be acceptably fast (but not, as I recall, anywhere near as fast as the GPU). Inter-device communication is not a big issue with Iray - even with a good GPU the time taken within the GPU doing the render is much longer than the time taken to transfer the data - so I doubt that there will be significant bottlenecking; on the other hand, if you are not expecting the Iray renders to drop to CPU then the threadripper would probably eb far more than you'd need for DS.

JCarver

Richard Haseltine said:

The 3070 is prsumably with 8GB? As long as the scene fits into that it should be faster than a CPU render, but if your render drops to CPU the Threadripper may well be acceptably fast (but not, as I recall, anywhere near as fast as the GPU). Inter-device communication is not a big issue with Iray - even with a good GPU the time taken within the GPU doing the render is much longer than the time taken to transfer the data - so I doubt that there will be significant bottlenecking; on the other hand, if you are not expecting the Iray renders to drop to CPU then the threadripper would probably eb far more than you'd need for DS.

Thank you for your response, Richard! Yes, my 3070 is 8GB. This sounds like good news . I have no idea how to tell if my scene will get too big for my GPU. However, since I'm using a very cheap, crappy computer right now, I'm in the habit of rendering pictures in multiple layers one at a time (background, middleground, foreground), so maybe I'll keep that custom on my new pc(?). So it sounds like I can't really go wrong whether I get the threadripper or not? Should I still get the threadripper for the other software I mentioned? Marvelous Designer, Indesign, etc.? Thanks!

TheMysteryIsThePoint

Hi @JCarver

You CPU and GPU do not have to be "matched". But in my opinion, a TR is a complete waste of money because:

1) There is no CPU on the planet, the 3960 included, that wouldn't be outperformed many times by a decent GPU. I think my test results from a couple years ago was that a single 2080ti was 6 times faster than a TR 1950. If you're rendering on the CPU, at least in Iray, you must consider that as a problem needing to be fixed.

2) Between Daz Studio and Marvelous designer, there are no compute intensive tasks that are not performed on the GPU, so the biggest, baddest CPU out there is irrelevant. The exception might be other types of sims done in, say, Blender, but they're all single threaded and so a TR stilldoes you no good.

3) Most tasks you'll be performing are single threaded. For example, most of the time my system has 1 poor CPU thread at 100%, and 31 at or near 0%. You'd be better off with fewer, faster threads like the Ryzen 9, perhaps.

4) The biggest benefit of the TR when I built my system was the additional PCIe lanes, but if you're only going to run 1 GPU or two, that's irrelevant as well.

For compiling large projects like Blender, that 3960 will absolutely SCREAM through it because all the cores will actually get used; I love my TR every time I type "make", but for most other things, it's not that special.

Your build is extremely CPU heavy and GPU light. A 3090 or 3080 would make much more of an impact on your experience than the 3960.

JCarver

TheMysteryIsThePoint said:

Hi @JCarver

You CPU and GPU do not have to be "matched". But in my opinion, a TR is a complete waste of money because:

1) There is no CPU on the planet, the 3960 included, that wouldn't be outperformed many times by a decent GPU. I think my test results from a couple years ago was that a single 2080ti was 6 times faster than a TR 1950. If you're rendering on the CPU, at least in Iray, you must consider that as a problem needing to be fixed.

2) Between Daz Studio and Marvelous designer, there are no compute intensive tasks that are not performed on the GPU, so the biggest, baddest CPU out there is irrelevant. The exception might be other types of sims done in, say, Blender, but they're all single threaded and so a TR stilldoes you no good.

3) Most tasks you'll be performing are single threaded. For example, most of the time my system has 1 poor CPU thread at 100%, and 31 at or near 0%. You'd be better off with fewer, faster threads like the Ryzen 9, perhaps.

4) The biggest benefit of the TR when I built my system was the additional PCIe lanes, but if you're only going to run 1 GPU or two, that's irrelevant as well.

For compiling large projects like Blender, that 3960 will absolutely SCREAM through it because all the cores will actually get used; I love my TR every time I type "make", but for most other things, it's not that special.

Your build is extremely CPU heavy and GPU light. A 3090 or 3080 would make much more of an impact on your experience than the 3960.

Well alrighty, I think you're convincing me to go for the Ryzen 9. That should make things a little easier on me money-wise. Though I am willing to bend over backwards to buy these things, I also don't mind easing it up for the benefit of my system and wallet. Maybe I'll see how the Ryzen 9 and 3070 work for me for a while and maybe swap things in a few years once everything is back to normal, if I feel like I need a more powerful system. Until then ANYTHING will be better than what I'm using now LOL. I'm basically willing to try blender someday (willing to try anything!) but right now I don't see how it could be better than Daz Studio, especially for my particular work process. So yeah. Thank you so much! I really value your advice. This is all good news for me.  

PerttiA

https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/341041/daz-studio-iray-rendering-hardware-benchmarking/p1

stephenschoon

I recently purchased a new machine with a Ryzen 9 5950X, 32GB RAM, 1TB PCIe M.2 SSD and a RTX 3080Ti.

The plan being that it gives a useful amount of power across all the components, CPU, RAM, storage, CUDA units and VRAM.

Think of the RTX3080Ti as a downgraded RTX3090 instead of an upgraded RTX3080.

When rendering with Iray let the GPU do the work and disable the CPU rendering. As somebody said above a Threadripper is completely wasted with Daz Studio as is it more or less a single thread application.

Best Wishes
Steve.

 

TheMysteryIsThePoint

JCarver said:

TheMysteryIsThePoint said:

Hi @JCarver

You CPU and GPU do not have to be "matched". But in my opinion, a TR is a complete waste of money because:

1) There is no CPU on the planet, the 3960 included, that wouldn't be outperformed many times by a decent GPU. I think my test results from a couple years ago was that a single 2080ti was 6 times faster than a TR 1950. If you're rendering on the CPU, at least in Iray, you must consider that as a problem needing to be fixed.

2) Between Daz Studio and Marvelous designer, there are no compute intensive tasks that are not performed on the GPU, so the biggest, baddest CPU out there is irrelevant. The exception might be other types of sims done in, say, Blender, but they're all single threaded and so a TR stilldoes you no good.

3) Most tasks you'll be performing are single threaded. For example, most of the time my system has 1 poor CPU thread at 100%, and 31 at or near 0%. You'd be better off with fewer, faster threads like the Ryzen 9, perhaps.

4) The biggest benefit of the TR when I built my system was the additional PCIe lanes, but if you're only going to run 1 GPU or two, that's irrelevant as well.

For compiling large projects like Blender, that 3960 will absolutely SCREAM through it because all the cores will actually get used; I love my TR every time I type "make", but for most other things, it's not that special.

Your build is extremely CPU heavy and GPU light. A 3090 or 3080 would make much more of an impact on your experience than the 3960.

Well alrighty, I think you're convincing me to go for the Ryzen 9. That should make things a little easier on me money-wise. Though I am willing to bend over backwards to buy these things, I also don't mind easing it up for the benefit of my system and wallet. Maybe I'll see how the Ryzen 9 and 3070 work for me for a while and maybe swap things in a few years once everything is back to normal, if I feel like I need a more powerful system. Until then ANYTHING will be better than what I'm using now LOL. I'm basically willing to try blender someday (willing to try anything!) but right now I don't see how it could be better than Daz Studio, especially for my particular work process. So yeah. Thank you so much! I really value your advice. This is all good news for me.  

You just said the magic word that always triggers me: "Blender" :)

It is definitely worth your effort, and getting Daz content into Blender is dead simple these days. The Diffeomorphic plugin works flawlessly 99% percent of the time, is gaining features by the minute, I've written an Alembic exporter called Sagan, and @Cinus has written a cool hair converter.

I mention Blender because between Optix, denoising, the "Simplify" button, persistent data, the upcoming Cycles-X, and not to mention EEVEE getting better and better every release, you have so many reasons to prefer rendering in Blender over IRay. With just clicking a few buttons and no hardware upgrades, I am rendering stills on average 4 times faster than I was two years ago, and animating about 12 times faster. All this is to say that sometimes, you don't need better hardware, you need better software.

Because Blender is a bonafide modeling environment, I was able to easily solve some cloth simulation problems that was messing with dForce. Or model props that I couldn't find elsewhere.

And then there's all the simulation that Blender can do for cloth, fluids, smoke, rigid and soft bodies, etc.

Lastly but not leastly, Youtube is absolutely awash with tutorials for absolutely everything.

I think learning Blender is the single most effective thing you can do to improve your experience with Daz Studio content, and when you do, you'll kick yourself for not doing it sooner. Admittedly, it's an undertaking, but it's exhilerating the first time a little creativity in Blender allows you to do something that would have been impossible in Daz Studio.

JCarver

stephenschoon said:

I recently purchased a new machine with a Ryzen 9 5950X, 32GB RAM, 1TB PCIe M.2 SSD and a RTX 3080Ti.

The plan being that it gives a useful amount of power across all the components, CPU, RAM, storage, CUDA units and VRAM.

Think of the RTX3080Ti as a downgraded RTX3090 instead of an upgraded RTX3080.

When rendering with Iray let the GPU do the work and disable the CPU rendering. As somebody said above a Threadripper is completely wasted with Daz Studio as is it more or less a single thread application.

Best Wishes
Steve.

 

Thank you, I will keep this in mind!  

JCarver

TheMysteryIsThePoint said:

You just said the magic word that always triggers me: "Blender" :)

It is definitely worth your effort, and getting Daz content into Blender is dead simple these days. The Diffeomorphic plugin works flawlessly 99% percent of the time, is gaining features by the minute, I've written an Alembic exporter called Sagan, and @Cinus has written a cool hair converter.

I mention Blender because between Optix, denoising, the "Simplify" button, persistent data, the upcoming Cycles-X, and not to mention EEVEE getting better and better every release, you have so many reasons to prefer rendering in Blender over IRay. With just clicking a few buttons and no hardware upgrades, I am rendering stills on average 4 times faster than I was two years ago, and animating about 12 times faster. All this is to say that sometimes, you don't need better hardware, you need better software.

Because Blender is a bonafide modeling environment, I was able to easily solve some cloth simulation problems that was messing with dForce. Or model props that I couldn't find elsewhere.

And then there's all the simulation that Blender can do for cloth, fluids, smoke, rigid and soft bodies, etc.

Lastly but not leastly, Youtube is absolutely awash with tutorials for absolutely everything.

I think learning Blender is the single most effective thing you can do to improve your experience with Daz Studio content, and when you do, you'll kick yourself for not doing it sooner. Admittedly, it's an undertaking, but it's exhilerating the first time a little creativity in Blender allows you to do something that would have been impossible in Daz Studio.

Oh wow! Yeah, now that you mention it, I saw a guy on youtube who got a character out of Daz, made clothing in Marvelous, and then rendered it in Blender. As I said, I'm open to trying blender and possibly emulating that process, and I appreciate your testimony. For now, I've only been using Daz for a little over a year, so I'm really only getting warmed up with this 3d art thing. But since you say that, I will consider getting blender for my new computer (right now I'm using a very old and stubborn donkey who wouldn't even look at blender, so I couldn't try it "sooner" if I wanted to LOL).

SO, based on our conversation, I've been looking at the Ryzen 9 3950x (with 16 cores) to pair with my 3070 gpu. Would this be ok for Blender?  

TheMysteryIsThePoint

JCarver said:

TheMysteryIsThePoint said:

You just said the magic word that always triggers me: "Blender" :)

It is definitely worth your effort, and getting Daz content into Blender is dead simple these days. The Diffeomorphic plugin works flawlessly 99% percent of the time, is gaining features by the minute, I've written an Alembic exporter called Sagan, and @Cinus has written a cool hair converter.

I mention Blender because between Optix, denoising, the "Simplify" button, persistent data, the upcoming Cycles-X, and not to mention EEVEE getting better and better every release, you have so many reasons to prefer rendering in Blender over IRay. With just clicking a few buttons and no hardware upgrades, I am rendering stills on average 4 times faster than I was two years ago, and animating about 12 times faster. All this is to say that sometimes, you don't need better hardware, you need better software.

Because Blender is a bonafide modeling environment, I was able to easily solve some cloth simulation problems that was messing with dForce. Or model props that I couldn't find elsewhere.

And then there's all the simulation that Blender can do for cloth, fluids, smoke, rigid and soft bodies, etc.

Lastly but not leastly, Youtube is absolutely awash with tutorials for absolutely everything.

I think learning Blender is the single most effective thing you can do to improve your experience with Daz Studio content, and when you do, you'll kick yourself for not doing it sooner. Admittedly, it's an undertaking, but it's exhilerating the first time a little creativity in Blender allows you to do something that would have been impossible in Daz Studio.

Oh wow! Yeah, now that you mention it, I saw a guy on youtube who got a character out of Daz, made clothing in Marvelous, and then rendered it in Blender. As I said, I'm open to trying blender and possibly emulating that process, and I appreciate your testimony. For now, I've only been using Daz for a little over a year, so I'm really only getting warmed up with this 3d art thing. But since you say that, I will consider getting blender for my new computer (right now I'm using a very old and stubborn donkey who wouldn't even look at blender, so I couldn't try it "sooner" if I wanted to LOL).

SO, based on our conversation, I've been looking at the Ryzen 9 3950x (with 16 cores) to pair with my 3070 gpu. Would this be ok for Blender?  

For stills, that'll be a nice user experience. For animation, there are a lot of tradeoffs you can make to speed things up, and you are going to love EEVEE.

JCarver

TheMysteryIsThePoint said:

For stills, that'll be a nice user experience. For animation, there are a lot of tradeoffs you can make to speed things up, and you are going to love EEVEE.

Indeed, I think I saw that on youtube too. I'm excited about all this!