Graphics card question
polycounter lvl 2
Hi,
I'm building CPU oriented machine bu I want still be able to use Toolbag in some ways. So I have to chose a gpu and I decided that gtx 1070 is great choice. But after that I thought about rtx 2060 with similar price.
So what would work better with Marmoset? 1070 with more ram - 8gb, or a bit faster but with less memory 2060?
Thanks in advice.
I'm building CPU oriented machine bu I want still be able to use Toolbag in some ways. So I have to chose a gpu and I decided that gtx 1070 is great choice. But after that I thought about rtx 2060 with similar price.
So what would work better with Marmoset? 1070 with more ram - 8gb, or a bit faster but with less memory 2060?
Thanks in advice.
Replies
But you need to plan ahead, and leave these details as last step.
Also, small decimation would help.
As for graphics card. I went with 1070 TI. I know this card a lot and know how it work with toolbag (i got it on my other computer). It's nothing amazing, but good enough, especially for the price.
I'm courious about rtx tho. Very curious.
Nimlot uses 2080ti if I'm not wrong. So you can see it's performance on his streams. Damn good card imo.
960: 5811
2060: 13115 +2.3x faster
2070: 14404 +2.5x faster
2080: 15712 2.7x faster
2080 TI: 16953 2.9x faster
Any of these cards will be way faster than your current card, at least 2x, even the 2060. To me, the sweet spot here is the 2060-2070. When we break down performance vs price we get:
2060: $350 - Value: 37
2070: $500 - Value: 28
2080: $700 - Value: 22
2080 Ti: $1190 - Value: 14
In terms of rendering speed, the more you pay, the less improvement you get - the price curve for high end computer hardware gets out of whack the higher up you go. The 2080 TI represents a really poor value here compared to the other 20XX series cards, and the 2080 doesn't make a whole lot of sense either. The 2080 is twice as expensive as the 2060 but only 19% faster! The 2080 TI, there is little reason* other than bragging rights to buy this card.
*While rendering speed is very important, VRAM is a consideration as well.
The 2060 has 6GB of ram, which is a bit low, especially if you're planning on working with 100 million poly meshes and 8K textures in Substance.
If we move up to the 2070 and the 2080, we get 8GB of ram. My general rule of thumb for baking in Toolbag is 50 million max on a 4GB card and 100 million max on an 8GB card, though you'll see better responsiveness at about half those counts. Since both the 2070 and 2080 have 8GB, the 2080 has little advantage here, you're paying an extra $200 for 10% faster rendering speed, which doesn't make much sense.
Going to the 2080 TI you get 11GB, which is nice, but again the value proposition here is very poor. You're paying over 2x more vs the 2070 for a 15% speed boost and an extra 3GB of RAM. I think this is a bad choice. If it had 16GB of ram or something it would make sense, but 11GB isn't very compelling. It's unfortunate that nVidia didn't do something like 2070: 8GB, 2080: 12GB, 2080 TI: 16gb, I hope they get to something close to those VRAM specs at some point but I think they are trying to protect the Quadro line.
AMD just announced the Radeon 7 VII with 16GB VRAM, so it would be worth checking out that card as well. It looks like it's nearly as fast as the 2080, with double the VRAM, for the same price. Dealing with very high geometry counts, VRAM is probably more of a factor than pure speed. A slower card means a longer bake time, but if you can't fit the content into memory you're going to have more serious problems (bake fails, crashing, etc).
In general Thomas' advice is great, a bit more time spent managing your triangle usage will likely be much more beneficial than buying a super high end GPU. If you can get that 100 million tri character down to 50 million, you'll get much better performance overall, regardless of the card.
Now, as to AO ray counts in Toolbag, 512 generally provides very good quality and 1024 provides exceptional quality. Beyond that there are diminishing returns and you're likely increasing your render times for little to no improvement in quality. You should do a series of tests at 256, 512, 1K, 2K, and 4K to verify, but really, going to 4K or 8K rays makes very little sense.