I have a Dell XP 8900 with an Nvidia GTX 745, 16 gb ram, and i7-6700 CPU. It renders pretty slowly. What would be the most cost-effective way to boost render speed?

I think graphic card would be where to invest your funds I have an i7-6700K CPU and a GTX 980 Ti GPU RAM 6 GB and I am also planning a upgrade to one of the newer Nvidia RTX cards actually had a discussion about this with LuxXeon in one thread and he shared some very useful information we went back and forth on to consider and such you might find the thread rather useful as well

https://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/?thread_id=2936903#msg4359927

Thanks, Lobo, I was going to recommend that thread to read as well. We covered a lot of considerations when it comes to graphics cards for Blender in there.

To the OP, just quickly ascertaining your current setup, I could already tell that your weakest link in there is going to be the GPU. The GTX 745 has 384 Cuda cores (which is quite low already), with a base clock speed of 1033 MHz (not GHz). It would have been considered a powerful card for GPU rendering back in the early days (2012) of the Octane render engine, but more recent versions of GPU software contain a lot of additional features and really need more horsepower to take advantage of it. Cycles isn't quite as fast as Octane on the GPU alone, but Cycles can also take advantage of your CPU as well (in GPU experimental mode), which would allow your CPU cores to help out with the rendering for things like denoising, etc.

Your CPU isn't too bad. It's a 4 core, 8 thread processor with 3.4GHz base clock. It's not overclockable, but I believe it does have a boost clock up to 4.0 GHz. So, even though it's about 4 years old now, that processor is around the same performance value of the Ryzen 5 2600, which came out in 2018. The Ryzen would perform a little better, but it's comparable.

I don't know what kind of system ram you have, but just looking at those two components, I would bet money that the major bottleneck for rendering in that setup is the GPU. It's just not really a good companion to your CPU when it comes to GPU enhanced rendering in Cycles, especially if you use GPU experimental to include the CPU.

Just wanted to mention a little side-note here, if you do decide to step up with your GPU you need to keep in mind what kind of PSU you have in that machine, and also the PCIe slot configuration of your motherboard. Almost ALL the newer gen cards are going to take up two PCIe spots on your board. They only require 1 PCIe x16 slot to run, obviously, but they are so large they will often obscure the x4 slot directly beneath it on some of the pre-configured PC boards. I believe your current GTX 745 is an OEM card with a single slot form factor? If this is so, then be sure a newer card will not interfere with whatever PCIe x4 card is beneath it, such as a sound card or whatever.

Helpful thread, thanks guys. I read somewhere- can't find it now- something about different rendering engines having issues with NVIDIA vs Radeon GPUs. I can't remember what the issues were supposed to be- are they relevant to Blender and any of its renderers? Also, I'm pretty confused by the plethora of 3rd party manufacturers of RTX cards and their pricing. I see, for instance, a bunch of RTX 2080 cards priced around $680, and then one from Gigabyte priced at $89 bucks. Is it crap? Is it a mistake? Is there something missing?

Is this real?

Okay, wait... the site sells jewelry, not electronics... weird...

First, I have to stress very highly to NOT purchase those GPU cards. They are fake. The bios and everything will report that they are what they say they are, but if you open one up, you're gonna see very clearly they are something else. Usually, they are actually much cheaper GPUs with the firmware hacked to report back whatever they want and then fit into a different chassis. They will not benchmark anywhere near a real authentic card. There's plenty of evidence of this scam out there on Youtube, just search for "graphics card scam" or whatever and you'll see the results.

As for the render engines. Most GPU render engines work based on a particular type of GPU architecture or API. For example, Octane uses the CUDA API, so you must use an Nvidia card with CUDA cores to render with Octane. CUDA render engines are usually the faster variety, but there is also the OpenCL architecture of Radeon cards. Cycles can use either AMD (OpenCL) or Nvidia (CUDA) cards. So you can use Radeon or GTX/RTX cards with Cycles. However, most of the benchmarks indicate that the CUDA API performs better than the OpenCL API. In other words, you will get better render times using GTX or RTX CUDA cards than Radeon cards of the same specs in Cycles. At least for now. However, the performance of the OpenCL in Cycles HAS been improved upon dramatically in recent versions. It's "almost" equal now, providing the card's specs are about the same. There's still some slightly better performance to be had with CUDA in the benchmarks that I've seen released.

Edit to say: you could find some authentic refurbished or used cards out there for good price points, but never ever trust anything that looks too good to be true when it comes to GPUs. There is a huge market for knockoff cards out there which are firmware hacked and absolute ripoffs. Gamer's Nexus and LTT have a few videos on this topic and expose the truth behind this scam. You'll get exactly what you pay for. If you get an $80 RTX 2080ti, you'll get the performance of a $80 card, even though every indication will be that it's really a RTX 2080. Not true.

LuxXeon posted at 5:43PM Tue, 03 September 2019 - #4361134

First, I have to stress very highly to NOT purchase those GPU cards. They are fake. The bios and everything will report that they are what they say they are, but if you open one up, you're gonna see very clearly they are something else. Usually, they are actually much cheaper GPUs with the firmware hacked to report back whatever they want and then fit into a different chassis. They will not benchmark anywhere near a real authentic card. There's plenty of evidence of this scam out there on Youtube, just search for "graphics card scam" or whatever and you'll see the results.

As for the render engines. Most GPU render engines work based on a particular type of GPU architecture or API. For example, Octane uses the CUDA API, so you must use an Nvidia card with CUDA cores to render with Octane. CUDA render engines are usually the faster variety, but there is also the OpenCL architecture of Radeon cards. Cycles can use either AMD (OpenCL) or Nvidia (CUDA) cards. So you can use Radeon or GTX/RTX cards with Cycles. However, most of the benchmarks indicate that the CUDA API performs better than the OpenCL API. In other words, you will get better render times using GTX or RTX CUDA cards than Radeon cards of the same specs in Cycles. At least for now. However, the performance of the OpenCL in Cycles HAS been improved upon dramatically in recent versions. It's "almost" equal now, providing the card's specs are about the same. There's still some slightly better performance to be had with CUDA in the benchmarks that I've seen released.

Thank you. Yeah, I thought that was pretty sketchy. Interesting to know about the scam- it hardly seems like it would be the worth the work to do what you say at that price, but I know sometimes people work harder on a scam than just being honest would require for the same return.

As for the RTX cards- which one seems like best bang for the buck for a person with my current set up and very little money? I can stretch if it's going to make a substantial difference, but since I know I'm not getting top-end performance on my budget, I'd just as soon lose a little bit of speed if it saves significant money.

As far as slots go, there doesn't seem to be anything in the 4x slot (I'm not up for opening the case right now, (it's complicated....) but that's my recollection. I'm not even sure what the 4x slot is good for.

Oh, and I think it has the stock 460w power supply.

There is a program called Speccy by Piriform that will tell you what's inside your computer, including the amount of slots, slot type and data lanes and whether or not it's available or in use.

Laurie

One thing I mentioned in the previous thread with LuXxeon is waiting I am a regular shopper at Newegg and now Amazon but I signed up for their E-mails which I have found invaluable to when things go on sale especially during the holiday season my system is now a little over 2 years old and granted I built it from the ground up so that way I can more easily upgrade parts versus a whole system and built my system for less than $2,000 and that is including case power supply and 20 TB worth of HD space and 1 TB SSD for OS and at the time high end GTX 980 Ti graphic card so take advantage of their sales newsletter to give you a guide line for what you might be looking to spend for upgrades also stick with major brands when buy and investing for graphic cards I saw some of those ridiculous deals for some non brand name cards that were later found to be re-branded refurbs or used cards and stay away from sites like Wish.com which carries allot of re-branded fake computer hardware

The PCIe x4 slots are typically used for stuff like Wifi, sound cards, video transcoding cards or some other type of lower speed and lower power consumption peripheral nowadays. Back in the day, they were used also for graphics or TV tuner cards, which are pretty much obsolete now. You could, theoretically, plug a graphics card nowadays into an open-ended PCIe x4 slot and it might actually appear to work, but only at about 6% of its capabilities. The only reason I even mentioned it is because rarely on pre-configured factory machines that aren't intended for enthusiast or gamer usage, there could be a sound card or some other peripheral occupying the x4 slot which is why they went with the type of graphics card they had in there to begin with. This would force you to either move the x4 card to a different slot or get rid of it entirely from the system if you wanted to use a modern graphics card in the x16 slot. Most modern motherboards don't have this problem though, especially if it's a name brand like Asus or Gigabyte.

Now the only thing you would need to be careful about when upgrading to a modern, more powerful GPU card is the PSU. A 460w power supply is more than enough for most average desktop systems with standard graphics cards or onboard graphics chips, but once you start moving up to the higher level GTX or RTX cards (or Radeon for that matter), it may not be enough. Depends on what kind of power draw the rest of your system has, etc. For example, the minimum recommended PSU for a RTX 2070 (not overclocked) is a 550w Gold rated unit. That's minimum. When you go up to something like a 2080ti, then really you should have nothing less than a 650w gold-rated unit in your system. I wouldn't worry too much though until you start going past the GTX 9xx generation cards.

Your current card is quite low on the CUDA scale, so there are luckily quite a few options for you to move up without having to worry too much about the PSU. I can only speak from the CUDA side of things, because that's all I've ever used for any of my GPU rendering over the past 8 years. So, considering you now have a GTX 745 which has 384 CUDA cores and 4GB of Vram, you should look for upgrade paths that not only has more cores, but also the same or better Vram. The first card up the scale from where you are would be GeForce GTX 1050 Ti. That card would give you 768 CUDA cores with a base clock of 1290MHz and 4GB of Vram. This would be about $325 new on Amazon. What exactly is your budget limit? This way I'd know where to cut off the recommendations at. Because just a quick look on Amazon also turned up a USED GTX 690, which has even more cores than a 980ti (3072 cores), for around $340.

If you're willing to sacrifice Vram, then more options open up for less money, but as it stands now you're looking at a budget of around $275 to $350 for an upgrade path that gives you cards with significantly more CUDA cores, faster clock speeds, but the same amount of Vram.

Just to follow up regarding the PSU... I did some research and it seems a 460w PSU will be sufficient and safe for a graphics cards up to 225w on the board in your XPS. That being said, a GTX 1050 (as an example) uses 75w at idle and could require up to 300w under load. So this would exceed the recommended watts on your current PSU for safe usage when rendering. I also looked at the GTX 980ti for comparison, and it uses 250w under normal conditions but is recommended to have a minimum 600w PSU. This means under load it could demand well over the 250w specs. So you may actually be looking at a PSU upgrade as well, unfortunately.

Edit to say: The GTX 1050 doesn't actually USE 300w under load. My mistake. It's actually just the recommended PSU for that card. So you're within the range of that. However, it's the minimum and might be cutting it close.

Here's some good reading about how far a 450w PSU can go with mid-range gaming cards... https://www.gamersnexus.net/guides/3036-how-far-can-450w-get-you-for-a-gaming-pc-wattage

There are some interesting stats in there about CPU power draw too. For something like a GTX 1060, 450w PSU seems like it has plenty of headroom, depending on the rating (most of these tests assume you have at least a Gold rated PSU). So for your upgrade, I think you'll be fine without a new PSU.

Sorry for suggesting otherwise in my earlier post. The only reason it concerns me when people have a PSU under 540w Gold rated is because I once had a GTX 780ti running on a 450w PSU and it fried my card when it died. My fault for not paying attention to the power consumption specifications, but that was years ago.

Thanks for all the information. In essence, I have no budget, it's a matter of how much interest I want to pay for how long... I got the Dell under strange circumstances- it made sense at the time, but it isn't very flexible as far as improvements go. It's not even clear to me what kind of PU I can stick in it, it seems to be kind of tight. So maybe the GTX 1060 or 1080 is as far as I can go. I'm tempted to leave it alone and started building a scratch system a piece at a time, but it would take quite awhile and I'd probably regret some early choices by the time I was done... As I delve into the whole 3D modeling thing I'm thinking more and more of a workflow that relies heavily on drawing and much less on rendering- doing only rough renderings to get the basic forms, primarily to save brainwork on the shadows and architecturals, and pretty much draw everything. More of a reference than a real render. It would save me a lot of front-end time on the rendering that I do have to do, because a lot of details could just be left out of the models.I can draw, the main reason I'm looking into the 3D stuff is to be able to work with film noir style lighting more easily and get consistent results. It could also be helpful for keeping character features consistent, especially from odd angles. Then maybe I can make enough money to get a kick-ass replacement system or build one from scratch. With that in mind, I just ordered a replacement for my defunct pen display. The current system SHOULD be fast enough to drive it and a second monitor, but if it isn't, I'll be looking for a GTX 10xx. Btw, when it comes to that, how do people feel about refurbished graphics cards? Is there a big downside or are they pretty much equivalent to buying new?

A factory refurbished GPU should be just fine. It may not last as long as new, of course, but I'd trust it a whole lot more than any shady firmware hacked card at a ridiculously low price. EVGA has some refurbished cards, and that's a good reseller name. Always go directly to the manufacture website or authorized reseller if possible. As Lobo mentioned, Newegg and Amazon are reputable sources. Be sure it specifies that they are "certified" refurbished. You will notice that prices on these are typically within $100 of the retail price for any particular card, which suggests the card is legit as well.

Are you creating comics from the renders? If so, you might try using the Eevee engine instead of Cycles. It will render fast even on older hardware provided your GPU driver supports OpenGL 3.3 at minimum. The results can be almost as good as Cycles in some cases but in a fraction of the time.

LuxXeon posted at 12:48AM Wed, 04 September 2019 - #4361159

A factory refurbished GPU should be just fine. It may not last as long as new, of course, but I'd trust it a whole lot more than any shady firmware hacked card at a ridiculously low price. EVGA has some refurbished cards, and that's a good reseller name. Always go directly to the manufacture website or authorized reseller if possible. As Lobo mentioned, Newegg and Amazon are reputable sources. Be sure it specifies that they are "certified" refurbished. You will notice that prices on these are typically within $100 of the retail price for any particular card, which suggests the card is legit as well.

Are you creating comics from the renders? If so, you might try using the Eevee engine instead of Cycles. It will render fast even on older hardware provided your GPU driver supports OpenGL 3.3 at minimum. The results can be almost as good as Cycles in some cases but in a fraction of the time.

I've bought a couple of SSD's from Newegg, seems like a good outfit. I should join Amazon Prime one of these days...

Yes, I'm trying to get a graphic novel going. Since it's a solo project I've been looking for ways to make production more efficient and still keep the look I'm after- there are trade-offs any way I go, it seems.

I'm just beginning to figure out the Blender renderers, there seems to be a lot of good material on doing NPR on Eevee. Since I'm not doing photorealistic rendering I don't think I'll be dealing with Cycles much.

I made a list of seven things I need to get on top of in Blender to be able to get a basic workflow going if I'm using it just as a reference. That's not too bad, although I've got some persistent health problems that are making it really hard to focus on learning these things. Hopefully by the time the pen display arrives I'll have the basics down and be able to step through the whole workflow and see if it's really practical.

Well, your physical health is always top priority over anything, so I hope you feel better soon. Now that we know what you're goals are with rendering, I'd say Eevee will be the ticket for you to get the type of results you want. The quality which can be achieved through Eevee are so close to Cycles in many cases you wouldn't be able to tell which is which. Especially if your goals are NPR, then Eevee will certainly do a better job than Cycles in far less time. The trick is just to learn the settings and how to configure them to get the best results from Eevee, and to get your hands on the best shaders for the job. The true benefit of Eevee is that it will work on almost any hardware from the past 8 years. So your current rig should be more than enough to get some stunning and almost real time renders out of it. Let us know if you have any questions down the road and good luck.

LuxXeon posted at 5:43PM Wed, 04 September 2019 - #4361216

Well, your physical health is always top priority over anything, so I hope you feel better soon. Now that we know what you're goals are with rendering, I'd say Eevee will be the ticket for you to get the type of results you want. The quality which can be achieved through Eevee are so close to Cycles in many cases you wouldn't be able to tell which is which. Especially if your goals are NPR, then Eevee will certainly do a better job than Cycles in far less time. The trick is just to learn the settings and how to configure them to get the best results from Eevee, and to get your hands on the best shaders for the job. The true benefit of Eevee is that it will work on almost any hardware from the past 8 years. So your current rig should be more than enough to get some stunning and almost real time renders out of it. Let us know if you have any questions down the road and good luck.

Thanks, LuxXueon. I had come to pretty much the same conclusion. I think my next step is probably to use some MB-Lab figures and try to figure out the basics of the kind of rendering I want to end up with. That will give me a bit of an idea of just what level of modeling I need to do, and what kinds of materials I need to work with, to get the end result. I'm sure refining that will be a process, but I don't want to do a lot of detailed modeling and materials creation that's irrelevant in the render. I've watched a bunch of tutorials on toon shading in Eevee, with or without Freestyle, and I think what I want to do should be pretty manageable, but I haven't had the focus to actually sit down and do it. Maybe tomorrow...