Recommend GPU for substance painter 2?

Moltar

I've been using the Nvidia 970 which has proven to be a very unreliable GPU in substance painter 2.  Something to do with 500mb of it's 4gb ram being absolutely useless.  Anyway, I digress - Can anyone here recommend a better GPU with 4gb ram or more for £250 or lower?  I've picked out a few myself but I want to hear what you guys say first before I buy something.

Edit - I should make it clear that the 970 is a fantastic card but when trying to view/work in 4k using substance painter, it constantly crashes for me.
Thanks.

PolyHertz

iirc the Allegorithmic staff use Geforce 980 cards, so I'd say that's a safe bet.

R3D

There's not much better than the 970 out there right now. Your best bet would be a 980. With the announcement of the new cards on the horizon, if you can wait a couple monthes the prices of all of these cards should drop quite a few $$$.

http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html

beefaroni

Either the 980 or the 390x. I've been texturing using both a 290 and a 390 and they have both been fine. 

I'm curious if the increased memory bandwidth of the next generation cards (GDDR5x and HBM) will help with Painters speed. 

ZacD

Wait until June if you can, AMD and Nvidia should be announcing cards soon. 

Jonas Ronnegard

painting really smooth in 4k with Titan x

Shrike

wait for the next generation at best. Also I doubt that the last 500 missing MB on the 970 is causing the problems.
Download GPU-Z and check if your VRAM goes to its limits. 3GB is a whole lot for a painting tool that operates on average on maybe a couple 4k textures and a 50k polygon model, even if you write and read them in real time, 3GB should be plenty. Those numbers are a bad joke to your GPU. Reading and writing a 4k texture every step should occupy somewhere around 200VRAM. But either way, GPU-Z will find out.

Also update your drivers.

beefaroni

Shrike said:

wait for the next generation at best. Also I doubt that the last 500 missing MB on the 970 is causing the problems.
Download GPU-Z and check if your VRAM goes to its limits. 3GB is a whole lot for a painting tool that operates on average on maybe a couple 4k textures and a 50k polygon model, even if you write and read them in real time, 3GB should be plenty. Those numbers are a bad joke to your GPU. Reading and writing a 4k texture every step should occupy somewhere around 200VRAM. 

Also update your drivers.

According to Alleogrithmic, every layer added is a new 4k texture added to the GPU. It's not just a few 4k maps being loaded into the VRAM.

Also, the 500MB thing is an issue for painting as it's access speed is super slow compared to the other 3.5GB. Once again, Allegorithmic has discussed this in quite a few places so I'm not going to repeat it.

They also have mentioned that the newer Nvidia drivers don't always solve performance issues, and in some cases, can make performance worse. 

Moltar

Im leaning toward AMDs R9 390.  It has a huge amount of Vram and competes with Nvidia's 970.

Everywhere I read about the 970 in substance painter, there is an issue listed with newer drivers (which are not recommended right now) or some other issue with it's Vram.  Im going to try last years drivers (apparently they work better) and see if this issue im having persists, if it does, goodbye 970.

Bek

nVidia aren't immune to software/hardware issues; I'd buy whatever has the best price:performance (and after googling that there aren't any known issues with vital software you use).

I also agree with ZacD, wait for the new line if you can.

beefaroni

Tidal Blast said:

For the record, there are a lot of issues with AMD GPUs when it comes to 3D applications and games.
You better stay with Nvidia.

Other than that silly Maya bug that happened with AMD recently I think they're 100% fine for 3d now (using a 390 here and another AMD card at work). In the past 4ish years, I've probably ran into the same amount of problems with Nvidia and AMD drivers. I've used a 560ti, 780, and a 390 and ran into issues with all. Mostly smooth sailing though. 

oglu

i need cuda... so nvidia is the only way to go...

beefaroni

oglu said:

i need cuda... so nvidia is the only way to go...

Ah ya that reminds me. IRay will definitely work better with a Nvidia card. On AMD I believe it just renders from the CPU instead of GPU!

Shrike

beefaroni said:

Shrike said:

wait for the next generation at best. Also I doubt that the last 500 missing MB on the 970 is causing the problems.
Download GPU-Z and check if your VRAM goes to its limits. 3GB is a whole lot for a painting tool that operates on average on maybe a couple 4k textures and a 50k polygon model, even if you write and read them in real time, 3GB should be plenty. Those numbers are a bad joke to your GPU. Reading and writing a 4k texture every step should occupy somewhere around 200VRAM. 

Also update your drivers.

According to Alleogrithmic, every layer added is a new 4k texture added to the GPU. It's not just a few 4k maps being loaded into the VRAM.

Also, the 500MB thing is an issue for painting as it's access speed is super slow compared to the other 3.5GB. Once again, Allegorithmic has discussed this in quite a few places so I'm not going to repeat it.

They also have mentioned that the newer Nvidia drivers don't always solve performance issues, and in some cases, can make performance worse. 

Its best to just assume you have 3.5 instead of 4 with a 970. So they internally work with multiple textures within a single texture and combine them at export then, that can add up of you use a couple layers for diffuse spec and gloss each. Did anyone (or rather Moltar) check with GPU-Z yet ?

VRAM can btw be rather cheaply aquired with AMD cards, where you gotta pay very big with Nvidia to get over 4GB, thats something to consider but careful with cuda requirements.

Moltar

Shrike said:

beefaroni said:

Shrike said:

wait for the next generation at best. Also I doubt that the last 500 missing MB on the 970 is causing the problems.
Download GPU-Z and check if your VRAM goes to its limits. 3GB is a whole lot for a painting tool that operates on average on maybe a couple 4k textures and a 50k polygon model, even if you write and read them in real time, 3GB should be plenty. Those numbers are a bad joke to your GPU. Reading and writing a 4k texture every step should occupy somewhere around 200VRAM. 

Also update your drivers.

According to Alleogrithmic, every layer added is a new 4k texture added to the GPU. It's not just a few 4k maps being loaded into the VRAM.

Also, the 500MB thing is an issue for painting as it's access speed is super slow compared to the other 3.5GB. Once again, Allegorithmic has discussed this in quite a few places so I'm not going to repeat it.

They also have mentioned that the newer Nvidia drivers don't always solve performance issues, and in some cases, can make performance worse. 

Its best to just assume you have 3.5 instead of 4 with a 970. So they internally work with multiple textures within a single texture and combine them at export then, that can add up of you use a couple layers for diffuse spec and gloss each. Did anyone (or rather Moltar) check with GPU-Z yet ?

VRAM can btw be rather cheaply aquired with AMD cards, where you gotta pay very big with Nvidia to get over 4GB, thats something to consider but careful with cuda requirements.

I checked CPU-Z and everything checked out ok from what I seen.  

I believe I have found a work around for my situation.  The issue lies with the alloted render time windows 7 allows the GPU inside games, applications etc (this is by default 2 seconds).  Due to nvidia's poorly designed  drivers (of late), the 970 often struggling to keep up with this time and when it misses the 2 second limit, windows immediately crashes the drivers and any programs using you GPU (Nvidia's fault not Microsoft's).  

So how did I fix this?  There are several ways, I edited some registry to "fix" this issue but I have just discovered there is a program on the official Nvidia forums that can do this work for you.  This is only a temporary work around until Nvidia fix the issue.

Issue > http://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/3633

workaround > http://www.wagnardmobile.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=8

Shrike

Good, saved a lot of money then. How much did it require in the end ?
So wait, calculating for more than 2 seconds makes the API terminate the application ?

Moltar

Shrike said:

Good, saved a lot of money then. How much did it require in the end ?
So wait, calculating for more than 2 seconds makes the API terminate the application ?

Correct.  Windows by default does this.  Apparently no modern GPU needs more than 2 seconds to render anything and it's an issue if it does - so windows does what its told and resets the driver which results in all applications using your GPU to crash. The fault is with the driver.

Edit - I set the time to 30 seconds, which is more than enough, probably to much but it's a safe number.

beefaroni

Huh, that's super interesting to know.

@Shrike - I usually run GPU-Z while I'm painting. At the middle/end of an asset I'm usually hovering between 3.2 - 4gb

Moltar

Update - Painted for 2 - 3 hours last night without any issues, some tiny frame drops but that was it.  Im sure this work around will fix a hundred other issues people are having, not only in Substance painter or 3dsmax but video games too.

Drav

Im having massive issues with AMD cards in UE4 atm, especially with dynamic lights.....I know this is for painter, but im guessing you dont JUST use painter. Id like to echo what the guy said above.....in my experience, either Epic or AMD cards are fucking up hard somewhere atm.

Just to add, i have a 970 with the second latest drivers and painter 2 runs fine

Shrike

dynamic lights, depending on how UE4 handles them, they can dramatically increase or multiply your draw calls, and thats what usually is the largest performance capping factor, not the textures or polycount. Make sure you don't have tons of unbatched objects, combining meshes and sorts also helps, but without knowing your scene nobody can know. So avoid having 1000 bushes of grass and such.

Froyok

Just chiming in to add some information :

- You should avoid the 970 if you want to work at 4K with Substance Painter (1.x or 2.x). We did a lot of profiling on this GPU (I have one myself here at work) and it usually kills the performances as soon as you reach the last 500mb of VRam (which can happen quite fast on big projects). Usually, every computation done with those 500mb is 10 times slower than normal. That include the rendering of our 3D viewport too. I have an 980 Ti at home which, as you can imagine, performs much better.

- From what I have been able to see during these last month, AMD drivers broke more often than Nvidia, causing many rendering issues or even crash of our software. Nvidia drivers are not perfects, but generally more stable (at least for now). We work with both types of GPUs here, and even Intel integrated GPUs. We also do some support so we have some metrics on the subject.

- TDR happens indeed because the operating system assume that a computation needs to be done in a certain amount of seconds, and if not reset the driver because it thinks the program is blocked. However it's wrong to assume this is true for all applications. While for a real-time rendering application this is logical, it is not in our case. Sometimes you can't break a computation in batch and avoid reaching the 2 seconds limit. It even change depending of the GPU computation power. Breaking a computation in sub-computations to avoid a TDR would even give very bad performances in our case. That's why we usually recommend to increase the time limit of the TDR to something higher than the default value.

If you guys want more information you should read this page : https://support.allegorithmic.com/documentation/display/SPDOC/Performances


I hope that helps.

trugb31

At work, we just tested the latest Substance Painter 20191.2 on the Nvidia 2080 with the task manager open. There wasn't a boost in map baking speeds from the 750Ti I had previously. The GPU wasn't even doing anything, we saw that everything was CPU bound. 

Jerc

The GPU baking will be part of the next release. For now, only Substance Designer supports RTX and Optix baking.