Graphics Card

serialchiller09

TimberWolf said:

Serialchiller - no infinite wisdom here! You will find that there are very widely differing and strongly held opinions in the rendering world about what to do and what not, but the Daz community is generally united in recommending the RTX 3060 12GB for an initial build. If you can't do it on a 3060 you're not trying hard enough.

Or you're us, trying to plough through animations for dozens of characters in a reasonable timescale...

I figured as much but so far I haven't had much luck getting advice so your wisdom is definitely invaluable to new users like myself. I bought the products you suggested and I can't tell you the difference it's been making and I haven't even scratched the surface of what these products can do. The subdivision part was especially helpful as well, I had no idea. I've spent a lot of time reading and watching YouTube but my mind likes to work from the basics up and I get overwhelmed by the scope of daz' capabilities as a whole. I also ordered a 3060 rtx and new 850 power supply. It'll be here today woohoo! While reading my motherboards manual I saw that using nvidia sli requires that the gpu's be the same models. I know you said that daz will recognise it but does it need to be configured via sli? If not it's all good, I can retire my 1660 but my motherboards max slot is pci3. With the rtx 3060 being a pci4 would you recommend upgrading my motherboard. Would it bottleneck the 3060? I've looked elsewhere on the interwebs but obviously most of the info is geared towards gaming. I feel like youre my financial advisor at thus point haha

TimberWolf

SLI is definitely not required. SLI is gaming technology which is, I believe, mostly obsolete at this point. Just slot your new 3060 into an available lane and do nothing else with it. Don't hook a monitor up to it, nothing. Let it sit there as a compute device.Your 1660 will handle all the day-to-day Windows stuff whilst your 3060 in Studio has almost the full 12GB to play with.

The software products will allow you to load in far more characters and props than you might normally have expected to have been able to use but do remember to set 'Instancing Optimization' to 'Memory' in the Render Settings tab if you you use Instancify. 

Forget PCI4. It's become a bit of a topic recently but it's utterly irrelevant. Studio/Iray transfers the scene data to your GPU for your rendering and a PCI4 motherboard will do it a couple of milliseconds faster than a PCI3 board. It's a one-off operation unlike games which are constantly transferring data to the GPU.

Don't upgrade anything else. Seriously. You don't need to. You're not building a games machine - you're building a workstation and what is pertinent for the former has very little relevance to the latter.