To update a PC or not, that is the question...
feldarzt
Posts: 128
This may sound mocking, but please bear with me.
So my current PC specs are:
Intel Core i9-12900K;
MSI MAG Z690 Tomahawk WiFi with Z690 chipset;
64 GM of Kingston Fury DDR5 RAM working at 2403 MHz;
GeForce RTX 4090 as the primary GPU }
GeForce RTX 3090 as the secondary GPU } both are used for rendering;
Kingston SFYRD4000G Fury PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 drive, 7,300MB/s read, 7,000MB/s write (in theory, but that's what they say in the specs) - DAZ Studio is installed here;
an f-ing lot of 169 CFM Iceberg Thermal IceGale Xtra 140mm case fans... about 15 or 16 of them, plus the usual stuff like CPU and GPU coolers.
What is the bottleneck here? What would you replace in this config and why? If replaced with something you'd recommend, how would it affect the rendering speed?
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Comments
Bottleneck ? That'll mostly depend on the scene you work on... For instance, if you have >20 G8/G9 figures with HD wearables / props + complex environments, both of your graphic cards and RAM might be bottleneck even doomed... If not, most of the time you'll have happy rendering with this rig.
If I were you, I would probably add more RAM and/or upgrade them to high freq....
Wow, what case can hold 15 or 16 140mm case fans? How do you keep them from fighting each other?
What decibel levels are you getting in a case designed for liquid cooling with 16 fans? It seems like overkill to me. The system you have should run Daz efficiently.
It can be a bit loud, that's true. But I keep it in the other room, thanks to the active display and USB cables, so I barely hear it.
As for the case's design for liquid cooling... It was the only one available with the horizontal MB tray and a valid case fan slots number. I'd prefer it to be more aerodynamically efficient, but it seems that to get one I'd have to order/create a custom one from scratch.
I'm not entirely sure this a serious post but I'll bite. If you just want to spend money then, quite obviously, the 'bottleneck' (hah!) in this PC is the 3090. Sell it, replace it with another 4090. At this point you can remove about 10 of those already redundant case fans as the temperature inside your case will drop markedly, as will your power consumption. Fiddling about with system RAM speeds and other edge tinkering won't have even the remotest effect compared to replacing that 3090 with a 4090 which will probably speed up your renders by around 30% to 40%.
Twin 4090s would be faster than our twin RTX A-series and we don't consider ourselves 'bottlenecked'!
It is.
If I’ve learned anything about DAZ Studio and PC hardware, it’s the fact that sometimes one has to replace/upgrade some unthought-of components in their PC to get better rendering speeds. And more often than not, somebody here on the forum has an insight into what exactly those components are.
Do I get decent rendering speed? Sure. But it doesn’t mean I don’t want to improve it even more.
There isn't much you can improve on that PC to be honest. You *could* upgrade the RAM speed but if that results in a measurable decrease in your render speeds I'd eat my hat. I'd eat yours for desert too.
I can't find the reference for this at the moment but somewhere in the nvidia iRay documentation is a description of how a scene is compiled in system RAM and then offloaded to the GPU in a burst job. Unlike games where you might see a couple of fps improvement with significantly faster RAM (obviously due to the constant transfer of data), iRay won't really benefit from it. I also think you could measure the rendering time decrease for the latest DDR5 vs. fairly moderate DDR4 from the last few years in fractions of a second.
Same with motherboards, PCI versions and all the other stuff that PC enthusiasts get excited about. Sure, it will be faster. Measurably faster? No.
I thought this was in the iRay programmer's guide but it's not so it might have been on the iRay dev blog. Page turners these are not, but both are worth a read in places - the dev blog in particular will often explain why you've suddenly got a 10% performance loss in your renders in a new version of Studio for example. Skip the coding parts of the programmers guide and go straight to the sections on Physically Plausible Scenes to get a handle on how to speed up tricky materials and their intersections. Not a dime spent!
From a scene creation point a CPU with excellent single core performance will save a lot of your time but not 'rendering time' per se. You already have one of the best.
The only thing you can spend money on that won't be diminishing returns is swapping that 3090 for a 4090. Going beyond that to an A-series card would actually slow your renders down. I suspect your home PC is faster than our very expensive commercial rendering rig.
This is something that I think tends to get missed when people declare any CPU will do. Final render time is less relevant for me than responsiveness during scene set up and test render time. I went 10700k with 64gb ddr4 to 13700k with 64gb ddr5 while using the same asset drives and GPU. The interface is a little more responsive, load times and sim times feel a little better but I honestly didn't do before and after tests. The big difference is the length of time before a render begins. With the scene in the benchmark thread and using the beta, the old setup took 6-7 seconds to begin rendering and the new one takes less than a second, render time is within margin of error. If you skim the results you'll see similar numbers from other people's setups. There are still some assets and shaders that will bog the system down but it is overall a better experience.
I agree that apart from 3090 to 4090 in the OPs system everything else is well past the point of diminishing returns as far as upgrades go. I'd take the lid of that case though and possibly the front to see what happens to fan speeds / noise. It doesn't look like it can breathe.
I am one of those people who will say that any CPU will do. If you're on a budget, as many here are, what they have will do. Studio really isn't that fussy and will work with really old components. When people pitch up with their 4GB or 6GB GPUs wondering why it's taking a week to render their scenes and want to know how to get things working for not a lot of money then, frankly, their CPU is fine. The GPU upgrade is the best bang for the buck.
However, we both know that a high-end CPU makes things much more relaxed and easier and the preparation for a render much quicker and smoother. Not essential though! I wouldn't recommend a CPU upgrade over a GPU upgrade for someone on a tight budget with an older system. Doubt you would too.
The fan ...arrangement... in that case (that's me being polite!) is a bit odd to say the least. I imagine if you modelled the airflow in that case it would resemble the average tornado. All you need is mild positive pressure to keep dust and other assorted unpleasantness out, not a whole weather system in a box. However, it's a powerful PC. I suspect it would post faster times than our dual A6000 and Threadripper machine but I also have a suspicion it runs a lot hotter. Less is sometimes more...
I wouldn't recommend a CPU upgrade over a GPU upgrade. I might consider a cpu upgrade if there was a cheap drop in replacement that was twice as fast as the current one while changing to a high end GPU.
As an aside I don't have any intake fans at all in one of my cases and the other one lives permanantly on it's side so I'm open to the idea of odd fan or case arrangements. Not a fan of panels close to intakes or exhausts though, even if there are vents at the edges.