Graphics card Advice

Started by cyphyr, July 08, 2019, 06:25:57 AM

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cyphyr

I'm linking to this thread since it may be relevant. ...

New build advice saught

Graphics cards.

Professional systems all seem to ship with either Quadro or AMD FirePro (Radion) cards which can cost as much as the processor and even go much higher into several thousand pounds.

My current system has an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 and I have been very happy with it's performance.
I have had some issues with a few scenes where I have loaded huge multiple populations and had a display slow down/stutter or even total failure but these have been rare and admittedly basically mu own fault.
I also intend to use the system for *occasional* gaming ... [cough] Star Citizen [cough]

So is there any real advantage in the either Quadro or AMD FirePro (Radion) cards?
Also is there any real disadvantage in them from the point of view of gaming?


Obviously I want to be able to preview as many polygons at once as possible and the ability to perform some simulation calculations may prove useful at some point. From Terragens perspective all I need is to be able to preview a scene and for the time being all rendering and final output is down to having as much muscle as possible in the CPU (see linked thread above).

Bang for buck is difficult to work out for a graphics card since (in Terragens case) it has no output as such but I am interested in peoples experiences, thoughts, stories and recommendations.
www.richardfraservfx.com
https://www.facebook.com/RichardFraserVFX/
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Ryzen 9 5950X OC@4Ghz, 64Gb (TG4 benchmark 4:13)

archonforest

I think you are pretty well set with your 1080 card. I would not change it at all. The price of a new quadro card is insane. Of course you can game with a Quadro but I think they are not optimized for this purpose. A 1080 is still a very strong card for gaming. While you can run games on a quadro these cards are optimized for CAD applications and as far as I know their drivers are optimized for CAD and similar applications. Of course a new quadro can produce sky high frame per sec in a game but not sure if the quadro driver will fully support for example special Nvidia shaders like hair or whatever they develop for games.

If you using only TG then you do not need a new card. If you using other GPU based renderer then a quadro might do some good for you but not fully sure.

The new Nvidia RTX series are looking good but we need games that can actually use this new tech. I saw one game that used the RTX technology and it blew my mind. The real time rendered reflections were insanely real! But right now I would not invest into an RTX yet. I would stay with the 1080 right now. I am sure it will run Star Citizen in full glory in 1080p. Perhaps higher too.
Dell T5500 with Dual Hexa Xeon CPU 3Ghz, 32Gb ram, GTX 1080
Amiga 1200 8Mb ram, 8Gb ssd

jaf

I'm guessing the slowdown/stuttering may be more to do with the CPU calculations and communication with the GPU when adding huge multiple populations.
(04Dec20) Ryzen 1800x, 970 EVO 1TB M.2 SSD, Corsair Vengeance 64GB DDR4 3200 Mem,  EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti FTW3 Graphics 457.51 (04Dec20), Win 10 Pro x64, Terragen Pro 4.5.43 Frontier, BenchMark 0:10:02

archonforest

Quote from: jaf on July 08, 2019, 09:43:30 AM
I'm guessing the slowdown/stuttering may be more to do with the CPU calculations and communication with the GPU when adding huge multiple populations.

Yes, and the amount of RAM can also cause stutter. I had a scene that stuttered until I put 32Gb ram inside my workstation. Then everything went very smooth.
Dell T5500 with Dual Hexa Xeon CPU 3Ghz, 32Gb ram, GTX 1080
Amiga 1200 8Mb ram, 8Gb ssd

Oshyan

Quadro gets you almost nothing good unless you are using a CAD app or some other fairly specific thing. Even for compute the regular consumer cards often offer more "bang for your buck" (and good performance). The main constraint is RAM. For anything GPU-driven that needs a lot of RAM you might need a Quadro or Titan. But those situations are rare and I don't think they apply to you. ;) Even for GPU-based rendering a high-end consumer card will do very, very well vs. a Quadro, as far as I understand. And of course Terragen is not GPU render-enabled at the moment.

As for gaming, Quadro will do *worse* than a consumer card of the same generation. They are clocked lower for absolute stability requirements, and their drivers are optimized for CAD, etc. and not games. There is actually a big difference that comes from the drivers, and you can't easily use non-Quadro drivers on Quadro cards and vice versa.

So keep what you have. Maybe later upgrade to a Geforce RTX 10-zillion or whatever (or if AMD starts kicking as there, maybe a Radeon Whoop-dee-doo 6969 :D).

- Oshyan

cyphyr

#5
Thanks for the answers guys.

I wasn't keen on Quadros. Every studio I have worked in uses them but they don't seem to perform any better than my card at home. Maybe it's just something that happens when the studio has to buy 100 pc's at a time and it's down to the system admins rather than the artists.

When you say the main constraint is RAM, do you mean video RAM or system RAM?
www.richardfraservfx.com
https://www.facebook.com/RichardFraserVFX/
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Ryzen 9 5950X OC@4Ghz, 64Gb (TG4 benchmark 4:13)

Oshyan

I meant, in a graphics sense, the video RAM. GPU rendering, for example, can be memory-constrained depending on the scene complexity, and how the renderer is implemented.

- Oshyan

WAS

#7
Quote from: Oshyan on July 08, 2019, 05:13:13 PM
I meant, in a graphics sense, the video RAM. GPU rendering, for example, can be memory-constrained depending on the scene complexity, and how the renderer is implemented.

- Oshyan

I'm not sure how GPU rendering scales per Unit but on my RX 480 I can use upwards 6GB (8GB max) of it's memory plus almost all my physical RAM just doing benchmarks. Sure renders super fast though. Additionally the PC seems to get hotter due to where the GPU sits in relation to case fans

jaf

I run the Trainz 2019 simulator (railroad simulator) and it uses 3.2GB of GPU memory and 65% usage whereas the CPU uses 6.8GB and 25% usage.  Temp for my video board hits 60C quickly.  4K resolution.  Haven't seen my GPU memory top 7GB of the 11 it has.

Lots of software uses your GPU now, to some extent.  Even the renderer in Affinity Photo (my Photoshop replacement.) Substance Painter Iray does. So a strong GPU will help even for a lot of non-gaming software and will likely become more important in the near future.
(04Dec20) Ryzen 1800x, 970 EVO 1TB M.2 SSD, Corsair Vengeance 64GB DDR4 3200 Mem,  EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti FTW3 Graphics 457.51 (04Dec20), Win 10 Pro x64, Terragen Pro 4.5.43 Frontier, BenchMark 0:10:02

WAS

Quote from: jaf on July 09, 2019, 03:57:42 PM
Lots of software uses your GPU now, to some extent.  Even the renderer in Affinity Photo (my Photoshop replacement.) Substance Painter Iray does. So a strong GPU will help even for a lot of non-gaming software and will likely become more important in the near future.

Yeah, Adobe has had GPU support for almost a decade now, but I have to admit it's terrible. Half the time I launch PS it says it can't load the GPU side of things or what not with some error message. Fact Affinity Photo also has GPU support really interests me. Thanks for noting that.