is there any way to render iray without breaking the bank/downgrading?

Upirium

I've been looking at graphics cards and don't really know what I'm looking for. I have an rx 580 right now that doesn't work for rendering so i'm using a ryzen 5 2600.

I haven't even really rendered a scene yet. I've been too busy working on characters. I do not render huge HD scenes, I render to the viewer. I don't need a scene that big. But I would like to render more than one character at a time and I would like them to have clothes and I haven't even gotten into that yet.

The thing is, is I'm a gamer to an extent. I like gaming. I don't want to get a card that can render but can't play games. I also can't get a higher PSU than 600w.

I was suggested a Gtx 1660. I come here, I find that you need RTX support. Okay. I was suggested a rtx 2060, which is already way over priced for me. I come here, I find that is trash apparently because of the memory.

But these are also people rendering huge scenes it seems. Huge as in like, the size of the image.

Could I get some advice? How is one supposed to render and game if it is completely unaffordable?

 

edit

i cannot afford this at all atm, but will this work? i was on another website and it showed the recommended for iray was something that was 2,000

margrave

Iray is a proprietary render engine owned by Nvidia, so you will need an Nvidia card to render it with the GPU. They're not going to share it with their main competitor AMD.

Bigger scenes will require more texture maps, hence they will require more GPU memory to store them inside the GPU.

You can render on the CPU, but it takes much longer. There's a product in the store called "Scene Optimizer". It's a utility that will scan your scene to scale your textures and reduce the geometry of your objects. Obviously they won't look as good, but smaller textures and simple geometry render faster, so you might be able to get good results with it even on the CPU if you use it aggressively.

Other than that, an Nvidia card with a lot of memory is required to render complex scenes quickly.

barbult

An RTX 3060 would be good, but that one is WAY overpriced - like nearly double. Reasonable priced ones are all sold out and have been for months.
I have an RTX 2060. It is not trash! It only has 6 GB of memory, but I can render two characters with clothes and hair in an environment. I rendered this yesterday, It is 2000 by 1500 pixels.

Upirium

margrave said:

Iray is a proprietary render engine owned by Nvidia, so you will need an Nvidia card to render it with the GPU. They're not going to share it with their main competitor AMD.

Bigger scenes will require more texture maps, hence they will require more GPU memory to store them inside the GPU.

You can render on the CPU, but it takes much longer. There's a product in the store called "Scene Optimizer". It's a utility that will scan your scene to scale your textures and reduce the geometry of your objects. Obviously they won't look as good, but smaller textures and simple geometry render faster, so you might be able to get good results with it even on the CPU if you use it aggressively.

Other than that, an Nvidia card with a lot of memory is required to render complex scenes quickly.

so what constitutes as a larger scene? large image size, or more stuff in it? is rendering two characters in a house completely unattainable? that's why i asked if the rtx 3060 would work 

but while i'm waiting for it is it even possible to render scenes like that with my CPU?

fred9803

margrave said:

Obviously they won't look as good....

That is certainly the case but only if your people are close enough to notice, eg. portraits. A few metres away from the camera you can't tell if the skin textures are quarter sized using this script. If you notice a particular texture looks bad you can manually re-load the full-sized one to fix it. 

margrave

iDiru said:

margrave said:

Iray is a proprietary render engine owned by Nvidia, so you will need an Nvidia card to render it with the GPU. They're not going to share it with their main competitor AMD.

Bigger scenes will require more texture maps, hence they will require more GPU memory to store them inside the GPU.

You can render on the CPU, but it takes much longer. There's a product in the store called "Scene Optimizer". It's a utility that will scan your scene to scale your textures and reduce the geometry of your objects. Obviously they won't look as good, but smaller textures and simple geometry render faster, so you might be able to get good results with it even on the CPU if you use it aggressively.

Other than that, an Nvidia card with a lot of memory is required to render complex scenes quickly.

so what constitutes as a larger scene? large image size, or more stuff in it? is rendering two characters in a house completely unattainable? that's why i asked if the rtx 3060 would work 

but while i'm waiting for it is it even possible to render scenes like that with my CPU?

A large scene is determined by how much geometry and how many textures the GPU has to store in memory. The actual dimensions of the image don't matter. It will take longer to render a bigger image, but the memory consumption will remain the same.

Rendering two people inside a how is possible if you aggressively optimize it. Delete unnecessary geometry, shrink the textures down, lower your SubD, etc.

richardandtracy

If the graphics card is not suitable, you can render in CPU. It's glacially slow, but can work. I have a GTX1060 with 6Gb. I compared a single face portrait, 55 mins in CPU, 5 mins in GPU. Think of 2Gb VRAM per figure plus 2Gb for a simple scene, that will give you an idea of GPU capacity. I have rendered 7 figures in GPU, but they all had the same textures for skin and clothing. My elderly GTX 1060 still works for iRay and it's OK for DS4.15 and may last for DS4.16.

fred9803

So there is basicly two things to consider with respect to a scene load. One is textures which if big will not fit to GPU specs and result in the CPU being used, which is slow. The other is geometry which you can't do much about unless you hide it or remove parts of it not in scene view. Instancing will not benefit geometry demand but will decrease texture demand, as will sharing testures between characters. Duplicating will do the same but you will have the option to change textures, clothes and poses of your people.... changing (adding) textures/shaders will of course add to texture load and GPU memory limit. There's a very good thread here about optimising you scene to render faster.