Hi,
I'm looking for Advice for upgrading my computer for faster IRay rendering.
Rather than buying an entire new computer is it possible to upgrade? If it is what would it take?
Cheerio
lululee

Here are my computer specs
Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-2320 CPU@3.00GHz
Memory 16.0 GB
NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450

First thing is to figure out where you are at now.

SickleYield has a benchmark scene at

http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/53771/iray-starter-scene-post-your-benchmarks/p1

Many people have posted their spec and times for this scene and you can see how various GPU or CPU upgrades might help.
As with most things, there are trade offs with dollars spent and performance.

Right now the best bang for the buck is a GTX 980Ti. Adding that to your machine in addition to your 450 is likely to give you the biggest improvement, if your Motherboard and Powersupply will handle a second video card. If a GTX 980Ti is outside your budget adding a card that has at least 4GB of dedicated video ram will improve performance. If your motherboard and Powersupply will only handle one card, then replacing your 450 will improve performance.

Retaining the GTS 450 and letting it continue to drive your monitor(s), if possible, will keep your new card doing just rendering and give you the best performance increase.

That's the same GPU as I have. It will usually load a naked human, depending on how many maps it has, but adding hair or clothes is usually enough to overload it and leave me in CPU-only mode. It will also handle at least some Stonemason sets, without any people. The extra RAM on the card Bruce recommends (6GB instead of 1GB) will make a tremendous difference to what you can handle, and the GPU itself should be enormously faster. I'm still dithering over whether to upgrade my GPU or get a new machine; since this one is over five years old a new one doesn't feel profligate.

Hi,
Thanks to all of you for such valuable and understandable info.
I appreciate it and will also check out the benchmarks now that I understand a bit more what I need to get.
Cheerio
lululee

It all depends on how big your scenes are, and how fast is fast enough. If you do large complex scenes, then more GPU memory may be required (though you can always fall back to CPU mode for large scenes). For speed, do you want knock your socks off and impress all your friends (real and on the forums) blow the doors wide open speed (plus break the bank to get it) .... or is really fast good enough?

I attached a performance comparison chart showing the top performers as of about a month ago. If your on a budget. the GTX 960 might be a good option, and you might not need to upgrade your power supply (400W min.). Sure, the 960 isn't nearly as fast as the 980Ti or TitanX - but it is still a great performer (faster than what I'm using and I'm quite pleased with my render times), at a price that really is affordable. With my GTX 960M I get good enough performance that I use the Iray renderer a lot in the viewport when setting up scenes, and always for setting up lighting and shaders. Making sure you convert ALL of the materials in the scene to Iray shaders will speed up the interactive nature of the viewport a lot - waiting for the CPU to convert 3Delight shaders to Iray shaders really slows things down.

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That is an incredible and very useful chart, I have a GTX 760, which does nor seem to be much better than my Radeon 7770. Bummer!!!

ldgilman posted at 10:12PM Fri, 04 September 2015 - #4226585

That is an incredible and very useful chart, I have a GTX 760, which does nor seem to be much better than my Radeon 7770. Bummer!!!

If your scene fits on the dedicated video ram of the GTX 760 (unfortunately most of those have 2GB or less) then for Iray the GTX 760 will be a major improvement.

I'm very happy with my gtx 970 when it comes to price and performance mix!

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Charts mean nothing to me. Looks like we need to get as much power as we can, including RAM, video RAM, etc.

Hi Tony_Stark,

On the contrary, I found the chart extremely helpful. Compare the Quadro M6000 specs to the GeForce GTX 980 Ti specs, and you might come to the wrong conclusion without the chart.

I certainly appreciate the creation of a standard benchmark for Render performance. However, I'm concerned that some folks are running the benchmark with all the spheres, and some delete two of them, so it would be best to name the benchmark with a versioning scheme to compare apples to apples.

Yup, a couple of days ago I ordered my GeForce GTX 980 Ti to replace my Quadro K4200 based on this chart (and some dissatisfaction with some render times)...

Tony_Stark posted at 11:27PM Wed, 09 September 2015 - #4227453

Charts mean nothing to me. Looks like we need to get as much power as we can, including RAM, video RAM, etc.

The GTX 1070 which has 8GB of vram, is currently rendering faster than my Titan X (maxwell) system in DAZ public build beta. Once that is optimized you will see very impressive results. I saw some good deals on below $400 GTX 980 TI 6 GB cardz, which also have similar performance in render to my Titan X but for the $ and the additional vram, And likely additional optimization, I would put my money onthe 1070 or 1080. The hybrid versions of those cards would be even better. Avoid the founders editions.

check out Sickleyield benchmark discussions you can see a lot of different cards results.

I have two new 1070 and don't get the founders edition. Get one with 3 fans you will need them. Nothing stresses a graphics card like Iray or Octane. Bitcoin mining aside you need to make sure your new card and PC case have adequate cooling. Right now the best bang for buck is the 1070. I got a Black Friday Newegg Deal for the Zotac 1070 with 3 fan configuration for under $345.

I'm sorry. I grimace every time I see someone suggest that anyone buy anything less than a card that ends in -80 for rendering. For a few dollars more, you can get a real powerhouse rather than something the manufacturer crippled to sell at a lower price point. Sure, get a -70 if you like to pay hundreds of dollars for less than optimum performance, but if you are going to spend that kind of money--you really want something that ends in -80, the more CUDA cores the better. Go look at the benchmarks on the Daz forums. I can verify what others have said about that series of cards, especially when coupled with another card.