Tech Talk Thread Hardware for Rendering

[Cirro84]

...

Some interesting ideas. You wrote about your garage, well - not all of us have one. You also wrote about 'humidity' and I went 'what?? You kidding?' But it could work as long as it's not a normal shed, and temps get freezing in winter time. But going heavy-duty construction work with pre-heating water flows for cooling and stuff, just for my little workstation?? This is a bit too much atm. But I thought about this when I wrote 'did u suffer?', you proved me right. I don't wanna sit on a back porch tbh. XD

I found some guides on how to build a more silent gaming rig, thought I'll probably come from that angle, plus add up some card(s) and silent SSDs, and see what happens. A good case doesn't need damping I hope... Guess a big case is a win-win nonetheless, as I will be able to integrate some slowly running cooling fans and still have proper air flows inside around components. HDDs only for backups if necessary, or used with swinging damping solutions so the noise of them turning at high rpms is not carried over to the case itself.

Cool vids, that's actually sth i was looking for, for a comparison of different GPUs. Still not sure if I should go for up to 4 mid-class cards to run concurrently, or better (I guess?) up to 2 top tier cards. Am afraid up to 4 top tier is too much to handle, I don't need that much processing power. I'm not doing the new Cars movie, as they did at Pixar's with Indigo clusters back then iirc.

 

[obiwan21]

Wanted to check back in. Got my GPU... holy crap the speed difference. Ended up getting a 1060. The extra 300$ for a 1080...

Saw we are talking hardware for rendering, but didn't see a good thread for render settings.
Besides this one:

You must be registered to see the links

Looking for good render settings to match some of the top games as well as some of the great fan art.

I am looking for say, full scene vs character portraits and so on.

 

[a1fox3]

Wanted to check back in. Got my GPU... holy crap the speed difference. Ended up getting a 1060. The extra 300$ for a 1080...

Saw we are talking hardware for rendering, but didn't see a good thread for render settings.
Besides this one:

You must be registered to see the links

Looking for good render settings to match some of the top games as well as some of the great fan art.

I am looking for say, full scene vs character portraits and so on.

Go here and look for the best looking ones and ask them what settings there using:

You must be registered to see the links

 

[NoesisAndNoema]

I saw a thread, in the developing area, about "the best hardware for rendering in Daz3D"...

Over the next few days, while I am wrapping-up my next release, I will be posting the "build" of the "reality machine". (As opposed to the prior posts about the "dream machines".)

Today, these parts arrived...



1: ASRock X299 OC Formula Motherboard
- This motherboard holds the "record" for fastest OC with liquid-nitrogen, or some deep cooling solution. The motherboard has all sorts of "super-cooling" hardware and software, special made for deep-cooling and overclocking. Though I am not overclocking, I may take advantage of the switches which allow me to physically turn each PCIe lane on or off, as desired. Thus, when not rendering, I can run in an "Economy mode", by disabling 3 of the four "Titan V" cards.
- Only real reason I got this, is for the 4x double-wide GPUs to be used, without a need for riser-cables. Everything-else is a luxury and will most-likely not even be used.

2: Intel Core i9-7980xe CPU
- 18 cores/36 threads
- 24.75MB cache (More room for "fast" code, for running programs)
- Independent "clock speeds" for each core (You can use one, or more, at max speeds, without forcing all to be "hot" for no reason.)
- 44 PCIe lanes, with the motherboard above, will give me speeds of 8x/8x/16x/8x for the four PCIe lanes. The rest go to the M.2 and SATA drive connections and various other bonus things.

3: Corsair H100i V2 Watercooler
- I hate the term "water cooler". It is air-cooled, with a water buffer.
- An air-cooled solution, with or without a steam-pipe/heat-pipe, would have honestly been fine. (This was sort-of a luxury, future-potential, item.)
- More for "steady regulation", while maintaining a quiet cooling of the CPU. It was available, so I got it. The only other decent alternative was a heat-pipe cooler with two fans and a massive heat-sink. I really don't have the space for that giant beast, and I didn't want to piss-out all that heat into the case, where it would heat-up the PSU, GPU, CPU, RAM and other shit, demanding more fans to be installed, to cool the cooler.

4: Corsair Dominator Platinum, DDR4 2666, 64-GB @ 4x (16GB) RAM
- The max that the CPU can manage, is 128GB. But I am using faster quad-slots. There is only one slot, per lane of memory, for higher potential speeds. There are less "traces" (wires) needed going to the CPU - RAM controller. Thus, this limits RAM to only 64GB max, for this setup.
- Just enough to fill all four slots and max-out the RAM for this motherboard. I may end-up using some of the RAM as a mounted RAM-Drive, but not for now. The potential for overclocking is high, but again, it is not my intention to kill my hardware faster than expected, for small gains.

Parts still pending delivery...

A: 4x NVIDIA Titan-V cards
- They are coming in pairs. I had to use two credit-cards to buy them, as there is a 2 card limit. Just my luck, one order was "rejected", since they don't allow preorders or "holds". Because they ran out of stock, after I got my first two ordered. Apparently, I got the last two in stock, in the USA.

B: Antec High Current Pro, HCP-1300 Platinum, power supply
- This 1300-watt PSU should be suitable for 4 cards, but if not, I will just get a bigger one. My Titan-X card only runs around 150w when it renders, but up to 225w when gaming. The Titan-V has a similar power profile, which can be adjusted if needed.
- That is 1300-watts, continuous power. Peaks and actual testing, show it sustaining well over 1800-watts, at the wall, with 90% going to the devices. I will have no problem sustaining the required load for the running system, to get that 90% efficiency.)
- My 1600 watt PSU only has 6-pin connectors. It is intended to be used as a second/assistive PSU. (This was used to power my 4-TH/s bitcoin miner, which is now a $6000 paperweight.)

C: Anidees AI-05S-BW, ATX Mid-Tower, Silent PC Case
- Just a decent looking case with 8 slots available for PCIe cards. (Most cases only have enough slots and room for 7 slots. It was kind-of a pain in the ass to find one with 8 slots. Though, I have no problem cutting-up metal to turn a 7-slot into an 8-slot tower.)
- This also has a thin and shallow profile. There is no drive-bays space wasted in front of the tower. Drives go into slot-space in front of the PSU, which is mounted below the motherboard. Keeping the top free for the water-cooler radiator.
- This will only house one normal drive, for the moment...

D: SAMSUNG 850 EVO 2.5" 4 TB SATA III 3D NAND SSD
E: SAMSUNG 960 PRO M.2 2TB NVMe PCI-Express 3.0 x4 SSD
- The 4TB SSD, for the 3D shit.
- The M.2 2TB SSD, for the OS and programs and virtual-RAM.
- These are also part of the "save power" concept. When not in use, and when in use, they consume less power than a platter-drive. Leaving more power for the CPU, RAM and GPU to do actual work. Also, they are cooler, by nature, without moving parts and motors.
- The other purpose, which can be argued all day long, is for obvious speed gains. Trust me, SSDs are way faster than HDD, in every way. When working with 3D shit, which is lots of tiny files that are constantly loaded and saved, that speed matters. Not so much, when actually rendering shit, except for virtual-RAM that windows demands for Daz3D to operate. (No, having a swap-file on an SSD is not any kind of real issue anymore. These drives will outlast my lifetime of use. Other shit in them, will die, before any cells become "unavailable to be written to".)

F: "Kill-A-Watt", power meter.
- My friend never returned my old one, so I am getting a new one. This helps me setup the system, to ensure that the power-supply and all hardware will be... Safe to operate at expected loads, and will not be over-kill, for the PSU to manage. (I have no doubt that it will be able to sustain the high-end load of the PSU's demands for sustaining the 90% efficiency. I just don't want to push that max, or be under that "load".)

G: My loft-bed...
- So I can build the system underneath it. To save space in the livingroom, where this beast sits now.
- The bed is lofted, nearly, to the ceiling. With room underneath for the 4K 65" T.V., which I am using as a computer monitor. Also, it will have the tower, a dresser, chair and table underneath. Storage when not being used. (The chair and table pulls-out, holding the wireless mouse/keyboard, for working. So I am not sitting with my face against a giant T.V. while I work, unless I want to, for pixel-inspections.)
- This will require a little "modification" for my use. Needs to be higher and the "table surface" has to be removed. No, I don't need the rails...

H: 200 gallons of liquid nitrogen, and a cryogenic freezer...
- Just a joke... The heat will vent outside, pulling fresh/cool air, also from outside, through the window.
- The bed should fit over the wide span of the window. The T.V. covering the "intake/exhaust" vents for the computer tower, when needed, in the spring/summer/fall.
- For the winter, this bitch is our supplemental "space heater", to offset the AC/HEAT bill. (Hell, if you are going to generate heat, it might as well be heat generated from rendering porn, or actual sex... Still looking for item "I: A female crazy enough to fuck me again"... That is a whole other thread! Hardware, Yes... Software, No... Purchase, Hell-No!)

I: A female crazy enough to fuck me again.

 

[Mr.AlexD]

did anyone have an experience with Razor Blade 15 laptop and Daz studio ?

 

[OhWee]

OK, so the RTX 2080 Ti reviews are out...

There is a noticeable lack of rendering software benchmarks, but I did find this Blender result on hardwareluxx.de



Several people on the Daz3D forum have warned that the last time Nvidia came out with a new architecture, that it was several months before support for the new cards was added to the Daz Iray suite. And both Nvidia and Daz3D have been rather mum on the issue of Iray support, so who knows if the new cards will work out of the box, or if we get to wait for a bit before Iray support is implemented...

 

[Rich]

Several people on the Daz3D forum have warned that the last time Nvidia came out with a new architecture, that it was several months before support for the new cards was added to the Daz Iray suite. And both Nvidia and Daz3D have been rather mum on the issue of Iray support, so who knows if the new cards will work out of the box, or if we get to wait for a bit before Iray support is implemented...

That was definitely the case with the 10x0 series - there was a non-trivial amount of time between when those cards were released and when Daz got updated to support it. I honestly don't remember if the delay was "card-release-to-iRay-update" or "iRay-update-to-Daz-updated-to-include-it." (Most likely a bit of both...)

There are at least two possibilities:

1. The 20x0 cards won't work until an iRay update is released by NVidia and then integrated by Daz.
2. The 20x0 cards will work with the existing iRay as-is, but won't take advantage of the new RTX stuff.

And, to be perfectly frank, I have no idea whether the new RTX stuff will actually make any difference to iRay, or whether it will only really benefit "real time ray tracing in games." It's not out of the realm of possibility that RTX has limitations that are acceptable in the gaming world, but which don't live up to some standard that iRay demands.

So, we just have to "wait and see," as always.

 

[OhWee]

I suppose we'll hear something as soon as a Daz user tries starting up Daz with a 20xx card installed.

I do find that Blender score in the Hardwareluxx.de article very impressive. If Blender gets THAT much of an uplift jumping from a 1080 Ti to a 2080 Ti, yeah...

The Titan V still has more VRAM - 12 GB of VRAM versus 11, plus it may have a workaround for the Windows 10 VRAM tax, but it just got spanked in that benchmark... by a card which is quite a bit cheaper than itself (@$1200+ vs @$3900 on Newegg)

Edit: Unsurprisingly, as of this post ALL of the 2080 Ti's are currently out of stock at Newegg. For gaming it IS a rather awesome card.

 

[OhWee]

Another update on the 20xx cards...

It looks like 20xx cards will work with any Octane Render version that already supports Volta...

You must be registered to see the links

This MIGHT be good news for Daz users, but of course we won't actually know until someone tries it or Daz3D makes an official announcement.

 

[Rich]

Another update on the 20xx cards...

It looks like 20xx cards will work with any Octane Render version that already supports Volta...

You must be registered to see the links

This MIGHT be good news for Daz users, but of course we won't actually know until someone tries it or Daz3D makes an official announcement.

I did some reading on the tech details of the cards. This is sheer speculation, but it sounds like the core aspects of the card may not be radically different from the 10x0 series. So it could be that the current Daz will be able to work using thise cards, possibly with just a driver update required.

The RTX stuff is interesting. That clearly won't give you anything right out of the box, since the current iRay won't know it's there. But what it does is hardware-accelerate the process of determining what triangle(s) "out in the world" a particular ray intersects. Daz/iRay obviously do a good bit of that, so it's quite possible that an RTX-aware iRay would gain significant performance from RTX. Specifically, what RTX does is provide hardware support for BVH (Bounding Volume Hierarchy) testing. (

You must be registered to see the links

) But taking advantage of that implies that you program in your BVH data structure using the appropriate formats, etc., that the card wants. So, if iRay is going to support that, there will have to be API's for doing that. Now, possibly that's already there - I have no idea how iRay works "under the hood." If so, and iRay update that links the external API to the internal card BVH structure could gain you that performance boost without requiring the Daz folks to rewrite how they send data to iRay. In other words, just drop in a new iRay, and you get the benefits. On the other hand, if this adds/changes the iRay API, then there will be an even longer delay (after the iRay update) while the Daz-gineers rework their use of iRay.

So, bottom line - we won't know until people try it, as @OhWee said, but the fact that Octane works is encouraging. It still, however, might be a multi-step process: you get performance benefits now due to more CUDA cores and faster clock/memory speeds, and then another bump if/when RTX support is added to iRay.

Or not. LOL

 

[OhWee]

So, DazRawb (I think he works for Daz) acquired a RTX 2080, and took it for a spin with Daz Studio.

His post here:

You must be registered to see the links

Short form, it works (no issues that he mentioned anyways). He used the latest beta drivers from Nvidia. His guess is that the extra functionality isn't enabled, but he still saw a performance uplift from a 980 Ti (as Rich mentioned, more cores, higher clocks, so this makes sense). Later discussion in the thread ballparks his bench around the performance of a 1080 Ti (remember this is a 2080, not a 2080 Ti).

I just checked Newegg. 2080's appear to be in stock at the moment but the 2080 Ti's have been out of stock pretty much since launch day.

 

[OhWee]

We have a 2080 Ti result with the Daz Iray benchmark.

Based on the numbers, I think it's the first (smaller) scene, not the more recent (2018) one.

You must be registered to see the links

For reference, a single 1080 Ti usually comes in at around 1.50 to 2 minutes or so without CPU. The 2080Ti came in at 51 seconds without CPU...

Also, DazRAWB successfully benched/ran his 2080 in an external enclosure using a laptop with a built in 1070. The two combined successfully, dropping his posted (eGPU) render time,
from:
6 minutes 10 seconds
to:
4 minutes 15 seconds...

You must be registered to see the links

Just gotta say, the thought of getting a 2080 Ti in an eGPU (with suitably sized PS), and combining it with my dual 1080 laptop...
:winkytongue:

 

[MaxCarna]

I believe the difference from Pascal's launch and Turing, is that Turing is very similar to Volta:

You must be registered to see the links

So, everything was new about the 10xx, we had to be tortured for several months until a iray version supporting Pascal was released and then some time for a new Daz Studio version. I remember using the Beta version for a long time.

Now, with Tesla and Quadro V being around, they anticipated the changes and Daz Studio Beta 4.11 already support it (4.10 seems to hang). I'm monitoring the benchmark thread on Daz Forum, only 1 benchmark so far, hope to see more.

2080 TI is too expensive, I'm interested to see comparisons between 1080 TI and 2080.

 

[Max Headroom]

If someone still reading here:
what do you think about the "Gainward GeForce RTX 2070 Super Phantom GS" for rendering?

 

[Deleted member 1121028]

I had a terrible experience with Gainward cards so I don't know.
But yes RTX card are good for rendering, at least for Octane or Daz, now they both support it.
From a hobbyist perspective I have nothing to complain about.

 

[Max Headroom]

I had a terrible experience with Gainward cards

What kind of bad experiences? Bad performance or bad manufacturing?

 

[Deleted member 1121028]

What kind of bad experiences? Bad performance or bad manufacturing?

Bad manufacturing.
Long story short, I bought 2x 970 on sales back in day, one for me, one for a friend. Good price, no performance problems at all, maybe fans a little bit loud but that's it, pretty much happy. 2 years after, both cards stopped working (random crash on bios, screen going black, BSOD, I tried everything...), not only a few days apart, but also a few days after the end of the warranty period.

Could be programmed obsolescence, or a manufacturing defect in the lot. I don't know nor I care, but never again.

 

[Max Headroom]

Sounds suspicious...