NVIDIA 4070 Ti Super Works with Akitio Node eGPU for Daz

tjamesnewton

Greetings All,

 

First time posted, longtime drooler over better rendering setups than the very poor Windows Surface, non-NVIDIA laptop I started rendering with IRAY on (back in late 2021).

I am a stills photographer who has done several galleries making prints and mixed media art for a few years, now. Got into computer rendered graphics through Daz.

After working overtime hours at my day job, I finally got a decent setup -- i9 chipset laptop that had native 3050 graphics dGPU. That just made me want more.

So, after much hand-wringing, while still desiring a machine I could take on the go and dock at home, I went for an eGPU setup (murky waters indeed). I landed on the Akitio Node Titan, and was not sure my machine would recognize the MSI 4070 Ti Super 16GB overclocked card I stuffed into it.

Well, I sit here astonished. The renders went from somewhere around 10 hours for a 4K scene to complete, to around 20 minutes. Even better, 2K scenes are something like a minute and some change, with HDRI based scenes taking a matter of seconds.

Simulations that were taking 15-20 minutes to stablize on the native 3050 are now done in under a minute. I had a ton of trouble finding ANY information about eGPU usecases for Daz (especially in 2024), so here I am posting my success story. 
 

The laptop I used is an Asus Vivobook 15 with two Thunderbolt 4 adapters, for those interested. With anything i7 or less, it probably would not be worth such an effort. I feel like my rendering dreams have finally come true.