Substance painter and video ram

RaptorCWS

My video card on my desktop is below the recommended system requirements but above minimum at 1gb of ram. it seems to struggle a little when painting on the height map at 512 resolution (way to small for me to detail a model at). My question is will a video card with 2gb (the card in my laptop) be able to handle a 1024 map better than a 1gb card at 512? Or do i just need to bight the bullet and by a quadro that has 3gb of ram? I Would re-download it on my laptop and find out myself, but I live in an area where the fastest internet available is powered by a malnourished gerbil in a wheel. It would take me forever to download it again.

Jerc

You should be just fine with 2GB on 2048 materials. What are your other specs? (Ram and CPU)?

RaptorCWS

Off the top of my head, both of my machines have low end i7 chips in them, and the machine with the the 1gb graphics card has 16gb of ram and the one 2gb graphics card has 8gb of ram. Thanks. There isn't any way of using my excess ram as video ram is there?

toren3d

RaptorCWS wrote: »

My video card on my desktop is below the recommended system requirements but above minimum at 1gb of ram. it seems to struggle a little when painting on the height map at 512 resolution (way to small for me to detail a model at). My question is will a video card with 2gb (the card in my laptop) be able to handle a 1024 map better than a 1gb card at 512? Or do i just need to bight the bullet and by a quadro that has 3gb of ram? I Would re-download it on my laptop and find out myself, but I live in an area where the fastest internet available is powered by a malnourished gerbil in a wheel. It would take me forever to download it again.

Hi Jerc, if a 2GB card is sufficient for 2048, would 4GB then be best for working with 4096? I am thinking of getting an nvidia 970, but have worries regarding the 4GB models only using 3.5GB, and any potential issues that may cause as I continue to use 4k textures in the future. Thanks in advance.

Jerc

IT will probably be fine. The vram consumption of Painter should only decrease over time as we improve our memory management.

WarrenM

One trick with getting the most out of Painter is to start it up first. Don't start Unreal and whatever else and THEN launch Painter as it won't get all the memory it needs. Or so I've heard ... but it seems to play out that way given my usage.

Froyok

WarrenM wrote: »

One trick with getting the most out of Painter is to start it up first. Don't start Unreal and whatever else and THEN launch Painter as it won't get all the memory it needs. Or so I've heard ... but it seems to play out that way given my usage.

Indeed, most of the time this is the best setup to use. However I have noticed that having chrome running with a twitch stream on the side for example can still impact the performances.

Bek

Also if you bought it through steam you should be able to backup the local files as you would with any steam game and later restore that backup on a new computer, saving you from having to re-download the program.

Annnd if you want to save some extra memory, you can try lowering the project's file formats. For example you could set the heightmap to 8 or 16bit floating point rather than 32bit, this has helped me with some stuff. And try to use fewer layers.

Ausun

I have a relating question here.

Does anybody know how much the memorybandwidth of the videocard matters in how fast Painter will run? In my experience I get smooth operation at 2k, but once I move to 4k I get that red bar at the bottom of the viewport with every operation. Is it the lack of memorybandwith that causes it to choke?

My current videocard is an AMD Firepro W7000 with 4GB Vram and a memorybandwith of 153 GB/s. I'm looking at getting a new videocard and I was leaning towards Nvidia GTX 980, which has 4GB Vram and memorybandwith of 224 GB/s. So the memory Is pretty similar to what I already have. But now AMD have released the 390 series with 8GB Vram and a bandwith of 384 GB/s. So now I'm kind of wondering if that would allow me to operate 'relatively' smootly @ 4k? I'd appreciate any knowledge/opinion about that.

WarrenM

I rarely find 4K to be a viable work environment. I usually work at 2K or even 1K and then export at 4K. It's nice that Painter can do that...

Froyok

Ausun wrote: »

I have a relating question here.

Does anybody know how much the memorybandwidth of the videocard matters in how fast Painter will run? In my experience I get smooth operation at 2k, but once I move to 4k I get that red bar at the bottom of the viewport with every operation. Is it the lack of memorybandwith that causes it to choke?

My current videocard is an AMD Firepro W7000 with 4GB Vram and a memorybandwith of 153 GB/s. I'm looking at getting a new videocard and I was leaning towards Nvidia GTX 980, which has 4GB Vram and memorybandwith of 224 GB/s. So the memory Is pretty similar to what I already have. But now AMD have released the 390 series with 8GB Vram and a bandwith of 384 GB/s. So now I'm kind of wondering if that would allow me to operate 'relatively' smootly @ 4k? I'd appreciate any knowledge/opinion about that.

We don't support FirePro/Quadro GPU for the moment, therefore you can expect some performance problems because of that.

We recommend nVidia GPU generally (if you avoid their latest drivers).

Ausun

Froyok wrote: »

We don't support FirePro/Quadro GPU for the moment, therefore you can expect some performance problems because of that.

We recommend nVidia GPU generally (if you avoid their latest drivers).

Yeah, I have seen you guys recommend Nvidia before and I will likely end up getting a 980. Although you don't support Firepro, Painter has been running very smootly most of the time. It's only really @ 4k I have any trouble and my last crash with Painter is many months back. But I'm looking forward to seeing how it behaves with Nvidia Geforce in comparison.

sagiarts

Hi guys,
nice discussion here. I am presently using Amd firepro v4900 1gb DDR5 vram with i7 4th gen and 32 GB DDR3 memory.Now smart material is very slow and sometime it crashes too.
If I upgrade/ downgrade  to Nvidia Geforce GT 730 4GB ddr3 VRAM will that put a substantial difference in performance?

Froyok

FirePro are unsupported GPU, see here ou minimum specifications : https://www.allegorithmic.com/products/tech-specs
With a 730 you should be able to be stable, but won't get the best performances.

Antonyony

Minimum

Graphics: VRAM 2GB

I have 1GB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 Ti BOOST do I have any chance to work with  Substance painter?

poopipe

It'll work.  Just not very quickly. .l wouldn't expect to be painting smoothly at 2048 but I'd imagine it'd be usable at 1024

Froyok

In general, for performances I suggest reading this page : https://support.allegorithmic.com/documentation/display/SPDOC/Performances