Second NVIDIA 3060 in a PC, would it double the resources?

elhectro

Hi.

I need to upgrade my PC to speed up the renders, and I'm considering the options. I do thousands of renders per week for business with a 3060, the one with 12Gb VRAM. If I put a second 3060 in my PC would it make me have 24 Gb VRAM and double the render speed? Or are there some limitations? And is this something difficult to set? I'm just trying to find alternatives to buying an extremely expensive RTX 4090.

Thanks.

Richard Haseltine

It would approximately double the render speed, but unless it supports nvLink it wouldn't increase memory - each card would handle its own iterations separately.

elhectro

Thanks for your response. So, if I understand well, it will approximately double the render speed, no matter if it doesn't support nvLink? And nvLink would only be to increase Vram?

Richard Haseltine

elhectro said:

Thanks for your response. So, if I understand well, it will approximately double the render speed, no matter if it doesn't support nvLink? And nvLink would only be to increase Vram?

Yes

crosswind

The prerequisite of doubling rendering speed is that both of your GPUs are utilized while rendering the scene. If your scene consumes, let's say 15GB VRAM, rendering with your duo-GPUs will be failed.  But with a NVlink, which is used for VRAM pooling, duo-GPUs will work well in this case.

However, IIRC, the latest Nvidia driver (no matter Game Ready / NSD) doesn't support NVLink with 2 GPUs, so....

StratDragon

personally I'd rather buy a custom shop fender for the price of the 4090ti. Just make sure your PSU and your fans and your case are ready to drop in the 2nd card.

DrunkMonkeyProductions

crosswind said:

The prerequisite of doubling rendering speed is that both of your GPUs are utilized while rendering the scene. If your scene consumes, let's say 15GB VRAM, rendering with your duo-GPUs will be failed.  But with a NVlink, which is used for VRAM pooling, duo-GPUs will work well in this case.

However, IIRC, the latest Nvidia driver (no matter Game Ready / NSD) doesn't support NVLink with 2 GPUs, so....

Of the 30 series, only the 3090 and 3090Ti ever supported nvlink.(spec list)

From what i can find, it's not Nvlink, but SLI that was dropped.

I think the confusion comes from the way nvidia lists the spec, NVlink(SLI ready), and people don't understand they're two completely different things.

 

 

 

 

 

crosswind

DrunkMonkeyProductions said:

crosswind said:

The prerequisite of doubling rendering speed is that both of your GPUs are utilized while rendering the scene. If your scene consumes, let's say 15GB VRAM, rendering with your duo-GPUs will be failed.  But with a NVlink, which is used for VRAM pooling, duo-GPUs will work well in this case.

However, IIRC, the latest Nvidia driver (no matter Game Ready / NSD) doesn't support NVLink with 2 GPUs, so....

Of the 30 series, only the 3090 and 3090Ti ever supported nvlink.(spec list)

From what i can find, it's not Nvlink, but SLI that was dropped.

I think the confusion comes from the way nvidia lists the spec, NVlink(SLI ready), and people don't understand they're two completely different things.

Right ! I didn't realise 3060 has no Nvlink capability ha ... but I know what NVlink and SLI are ~~ I used to use a NVlink with my old Quradro cards for a period of time. Without SLI enabled in Nvidia control panel, memory pooling cannot be activated with duo-GPUs. From a certain NSD version, SLI couldn't be enabled with two linked cards in Nvidia control panel... Then I dropped it with new cards.