Minimum GPU for photo/ilustration and no animation

guilhermecugler

What is the minimum GPU to render still images and illustrations without the need to render animations?

and can an CPU A10 5800K + GPU work fine only to those functions?

dtrscbrutal

I personally consider 12GB of Nvida based GPU RAM to be the minimum for Iray rendering in Daz Studio. More GPU RAM would be better. It can be done with 8GB. I am using an 8GB card currently, however it is very limiting. If you can afford and your hardware can support a +24GB  Nvida based GPU you will be much better off.

Taoz

Basically it depends on what types of and how much content you intend to use in your scenes.  With the right content you can render fairly complex scenes even with 8 GB VRAM, with the wrong content you can hardly do anything.  So the less VRAM you have, the more limited you are in your choices, like @dtrscbrutal says.  There are different tricks you can use to limit the VRAM the content is using though, so it all depends.

Also consider that the more VRAM a GPU has, the faster it usually is which can be an important factor as well. 

Here are some examples showing what can be done on a PC with an old GTX1070 with only 8 GB VRAM, using the right content: 

https://3dcontentmanagers.com/misc/3d_render_samples/

Padone

If you don't need to animate then you may also consider to don't use the gpu at all. This will save you a lot of money and iray will render just fine on the cpu, as well as dforce. This will also use about half the ram since there's no need to double the buffers for iray, so you need less ram too. And large scenes will always fit since you don't use vram.

The rendering time will be of course slower but if you only need to render single pictures it may be acceptable.

Richard Haseltine

Padone said:

If you don't need to animate then you may also consider to don't use the gpu at all. This will save you a lot of money and iray will render just fine on the cpu, as well as dforce. This will also use about half the ram since there's no need to double the buffers for iray, so you need less ram too. And large scenes will always fit since you don't use vram.

Unless something has chnaged recently I don't believe that AMD CPUs are a vaialble as OpenCL devices for dForce simulations - there is an OpneCL driver fro Intel CPUs. Certainly my Ryzen does not appear as an available device..

The rendering time will be of course slower but if you only need to render single pictures it may be acceptable.

PerttiA

Padone said:

If you don't need to animate then you may also consider to don't use the gpu at all. This will save you a lot of money and iray will render just fine on the cpu, as well as dforce. This will also use about half the ram since there's no need to double the buffers for iray, so you need less ram too. And large scenes will always fit since you don't use vram.

The rendering time will be of course slower but if you only need to render single pictures it may be acceptable.

From my experiments, if one renders on CPU, more RAM is used and it takes 10-20+ times longer to render one scene -> Rendering only when sleeping. 

Taoz

PerttiA said:

Padone said:

If you don't need to animate then you may also consider to don't use the gpu at all. This will save you a lot of money and iray will render just fine on the cpu, as well as dforce. This will also use about half the ram since there's no need to double the buffers for iray, so you need less ram too. And large scenes will always fit since you don't use vram.

The rendering time will be of course slower but if you only need to render single pictures it may be acceptable.

From my experiments, if one renders on CPU, more RAM is used and it takes 10-20+ times longer to render one scene -> Rendering only when sleeping. 

Plus CPU rendering uses a lot of power too.  My CPU uses about the same power as my GPU at full load (about 100 watt) but it takes over 20 times longer to render the same scene using the CPU. 

So in my case, if we say the scene takes 20 hours to render on CPU at 100 W / hour that's a total of 2 kWh.  On GPU the same scene renders at only 1 hour with GPU at 100% + CPU at 30% which is a total of about only 0.13 kWh.  And the rest of the hardware (boards, fans, disks etc.) also uses a certain amount of power during rendering which is multiplied by a factor 20 with CPU rendering, compared to GPU rendering. 

So, other things being equal, you can actually save a good deal of money on your electricity bill using a GPU, plus you also have enough CPU power to do other things on the PC while rendering.  

Masterstroke

No Mac and only Nvidea GPUs starting from RTX 3060 with 12 gig VRam!
Invest as much into your hardware as possible.

Padone

One quick way to "render" is to set the viewport in iray photoreal mode then snapshot the viewport. For some reason this takes much less ram and vram than a photoreal iray render, but the image quality is almost the same. This is not good to render animations or high resolution images, but it may be good enough in some situations, for example if you only need to render pictures for comics to be composited in photoshop or gimp.

p.s. Yes for dforce you need a intel cpu or amd apu, since amd cpus don't get a opencl driver. As for memory and speed, I can confirm that here the gpu takes more memory than the cpu, and I find it expected since the buffers are to be doubled for the gpu, then the speed depends greatly on the render settings and scene optimizations, and I do mean greatly.