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Dedicated Render Rig Help/Discussion

sebowmanxsebowmanx Posts: 2
in Technical Help (nuts n bolts)

Hello, Ive recently gotten into daz3d and am looking at what a dedicated rendering rig would look like, but am having a hard time finding conversations that arent upgrade talks or internet render farms. Im looking to build a dedicated pc that i can transfer projects to to do the rendering portion so im not bogging down my daily driver with such constant load. My basic findings so far is that you need a nvidia gpu to do iray renders, however it seems like the major workhorse in the rendering is the cpu? Ive checked my advanced render settings and see both my cpu and gpu listed as render hardware, a fairly simple still frame UHD render takes between 15-30mins on my current hardware, with the below readings (im a bit confused on how my gpu is being utilized as task manager says its being used at 7-9%, but in hwmonitor it reads 100% utilization)

i9-10900kf CPU 100% utl across all 10 cores/20logicprocessors 

nivida 3080fe gpu 7-9% utl (task manager, hwmonitor says 100%?) 6/10gb dedicated mem, 0/32 shared gpu mem

ram 14.2/64gb @3600

I'm decently tech literate, but i dont have great knowledge when it comes to hardware, so im hoping to get an understanding of how to proceed here. Say if money wasnt an option what would my priorities be here? Im curious what is done in industry, say pixar/disney, for render farms?

Do I look into those multi-cpu mb and throw together a couple 20 thread cpus with a low end gpu? is that even possible/worth it?

Do i need a top of the line gpu as well or should all the money be put in the cpu? my 3080 confuses me because the util drops to nearly nothing in task manager when i start a render and it seems the cpu is pulling all the weight, so i dont know if such a good gpu is necessary or am i miss interpretting something? 

It doesnt seem like a ton of ram is needed, is this true? and will ram needs change if say the gpu is worse? or more cpus?

Also is there diminishing returns when you approach absurd levels here? Is it even worth going for something crazy on a render rig, say 2x cpus a baller gpu and fat ram, or would a basic rig of a 10 core cpu + whatever nvidia gpu i can find in these~trying times~ + 16bg ram, be nearly as good? I dont want to be spending AMD threadripper money if daz3d renders will only get like a 10% performance buff. I'm doing some quick maths in my head at 1 frame per 30 mins, that if i wanted to do a 1 minute animation @ 30 UHD frames per second on my current rig, im looking at 37.5 days of continuous render time. Is this pretty standard? or could it be improved with a more optimized render rig?

Many thanks in advance for any help or discussion, really enjoying learning about this tech

Comments

  • Richard HaseltineRichard Haseltine Posts: 99,344

    In general the GPU wil be much fatser than the CPU. Task Manager does not give a good indication of usage (it used not to show any usage). Usually  you will actually get better performance by unchecking the CPU and restarting Daz Studio, if the CPU is bother rendering and managing the rendering the result can be bottlenecks. That said, if the GPU runs out of memory the process will drop to CPU so if you expect to have scenes that push your GPU memory it's worth having a beefy CPU; otherwise you can aim a bit lower.

  • sebowmanxsebowmanx Posts: 2

    Richard Haseltine said:

    In general the GPU wil be much fatser than the CPU. Task Manager does not give a good indication of usage (it used not to show any usage). Usually  you will actually get better performance by unchecking the CPU and restarting Daz Studio, if the CPU is bother rendering and managing the rendering the result can be bottlenecks. That said, if the GPU runs out of memory the process will drop to CPU so if you expect to have scenes that push your GPU memory it's worth having a beefy CPU; otherwise you can aim a bit lower.

    should i uncheck the cpu in the photoreal and interactive sections but leave cpu fallback on? thanks!

  • sebowmanxsebowmanx Posts: 2

    so what im gathering from lookin at this more, is that depending on the gpu and cpu youll get better or worse results by rending gpuOnly, cpuOnly, cpu+gpu depending on bottle necks and if you run out of memory on the gpu it will kick to the cpu.

    My question evolves to; is there a measurable metric to when it comes to rendering to compare say cuda cores to cpu cores? If im looking to spend 10k, would it be better to go with say 3x 3090 gpus and a barebones cpu? If one did go gpus only for rendering is there a measurable way to see your limits/bounds of how much "stuff" you can render before running out of gpu memory? If i went with a gpu heavy build, i dont want to be boned mid render stuck on a barebones cpu... hmmmmm Im assuming running out of gpu memory is a concern per frame correct? so length of an animation shouldnt cause problems in relation to gpu memory? just what is in frame at the time of the render?

  • Richard HaseltineRichard Haseltine Posts: 99,344

    In principle you could nVlink two of the 3090s and they would, when the feature was enabled, pool memory for materials - which tend to be the memory hog - with a slight loss of performance. Unfortunately there is no way to be certain in advance how much memory the GPU would need - the data in DS as it works includes things like morphs and joint weight maps, which are not sent to iray, while it is usually working with lower resolution meshes and textures than iray will be given.

    If you check the benchamrk thread you will see that even hogh end CPUs cannot get close to current GPUs, as long as the GPU doesn't run out of memory of course. https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/341041/daz-studio-iray-rendering-hardware-benchmarking

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