Video Card Suggestions/Information

[frogman_pep]

Tried to append my computer's specs in the signature. I wrote the information in the Status input of the About Section in my User profile. Can someone please tell me the proper way.

For now: Intel Core i7 6700K @ 4.00 GHz | Gigabyte Z170XP-SLI-CF | 32 GB HyperX Fury 2666 MHZ DDR4 XMP | NVidia Quadro K4200

I am posting this to figure out what the best video card within my budget is and clarify some uncertainties with overall GPU use within V-Ray, but other 3D applications as well.

For V-Ray renders I use 3DS Max 2020. I am also a Mudbox user and have become quite active with Autodesk Inventor for 3-4 years now. So my first question revolves around the Quadro line of video cards.

My GPU is a Quadro K4200. I had read that Quadro cards were best for CAD applications. Is this entirely accurate? Please share any details or resources to read.

Following the intro tutorials while using V-Ray Next 3.2 (also signed up for the Beta version) I got the warning [VUtils::setDenoisingDeviceContext] No suitable CUDA devices available for denoising. Compute capability >= 5.0 is required.

At the present moment believe 5.2 Compute Capability is needed, right? Went to: https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-gpus and looked through what cards fit those requirements. Then scouted video cards on eBay to see what would fall into my budget.

As of now can only spend between $300-500, but in a month or so might be able to afford in the $600-900 range (or hopefully, maybe, more...)) Might even be worth getting a card asap, and then upgrading to another one after a few months..?

As mentioned previously am not certain if getting another Quadro card is the best idea, as I have read that using a Quadro for display and pairing with another type for rendering would be an ideal setup. Could someone elaborate what would be best?

So in short hoping to figure out what are some of the best options? In the $300-500 range found:

Quadro M6000 & Quadro P2200

In the $600-900: Quadro P4000 & Quadro RTX4000

How important will a higher Compute Compatibility than 5.2 be? Meaning in the coming 2-6 months will 6.1 or higher be the requirement?

Thanks, have a spectacular day.

[joconnell]

Wait til august / september. Nvidia are waiting for amd to bring out their next card which apparently beats nvidia's current top card, Nvidia then brings out it's new card to immediately beat amd's new card. As a rule, I've never found amd cards to have stable drivers so I'm only buying nvidia. You're right that quadros have benefits for cad (less viewport glitches which we don't care about in vfx / animation) but we don't get any of that. The big difference these days is the quadros / titans tend to be a little quicker than the geforces but they have far more on board memory. If you intend on using vray gpu then the memory amount will determine how large a scene you can render on the card but you can fit an awful lot onto something like an 11 gig card if used well.

[frogman_pep]

Thank you joconnell

One other question I've been pondering, how much advancement does upgrading monitors bring?

So from what I've digested before, to the input you have shared. I'm thinking for my setup it might be best to get a GeForce or Titan card to use for VFX / Animation stuff, and keep the Quadro K4200 in as well and use that card for CAD. And being you can get a card like the GeForce GTX Titan X 12GB for $400 that would allow my capabilities to be a lot greater.

Assuming you are saying wait till Septemberish because once the new card hits the market, the prices will drop for older cards. Not sure about waiting that long, as I feel there is a lot of revenue to make in the time being.

[joconnell]

Monitors are a quality of life thing - I work with two 24" monitors so I can have a full 3dsmax window and a full vray render window, or a screen full of reference. Some people like having a single large monitor, it's personal preference. The geforce 3000 cards that are coming out will wipe the floor with an original titan for vray gpu rendering, all depends on what type of work you want to do and what your deadlines are like - talking of your revenue, are you doing stills or animation? P.s. in terms of keeping the quadro for cad, don't think that the geforce cards are bad for cad performance at all it's just that for really critical things like engineering or medical displays, you don't want to be guessing if a little glitch on part of your model is a serious error in what your data or if it's just a graphics card mess up. For vfx, we couldn't give a monkeys if the viewport isn't perfect since we use our renders to judge the final results.

Say you're currently rendering stills on your cpu, swapping to GPU will be a bit different (you're advised to start off new projects with vray gpu as your renderer right from the start so you don't come across features from cpu that aren't supported yet) but it will likely be a lot faster to render than cpu so you've got a benefit there to how you work. Say you're doing gigantic messy vfx scenes, they might not fit in gpu ram for now unless you bought a big quadro card (might be 5000 bucks to get a large amount of gpu ram) so you might be better of spending your money on training to be more efficient / sneakier with your scenes.

I'm going to go out on a limb based on you saying you might do vfx, might do cad and say you're kind of a general 3d op with no specific leaning for now, if you give some more info on what type of work you do we can be more helpful about what may give you the best benefits. Extra speed is always good for rendering - the faster you can render, the more revisions you can do of a shot and the better your results are. Or if something goes horribly wrong, the faster you can fix it!

https://benchmark.chaosgroup.com/ is great to check things too. If you run the gpu benchmark on your cpu and gpu and then compare to other cards at least you'll get a sense how much faster you could get with a new card within your budget!

[frogman_pep]

I'm focusing on product, character and environment renders. You can view the modest start I've accomplished at: frogmandesignz if you'd like. I have spent some time learning a descent bit about rigging, but am not looking to do heavy VFX animations at the moment, more for demonstrations.

Which is what my major goal has been. To create interactive projects either using a framework like three.JS, or an engine like Unreal.

Thanks for all your insight. I now have good direction to make some choices.

[BeneZ]

Hello,
thanks for the informations.

I had a look at the lists for GPU https://benchmark.chaosgroup.com/next/gpu and CPU https://benchmark.chaosgroup.com/next/cpu

- What does ist mean if there is at GPU in the end added for example "x 4" or "x 7" ?
Is it just the number of testings or anything else?

- Does it have any negative impact on performance if a computer has two different cards? (one slow and one fast)

[frogman_pep]

BeneZ

Not sure about using different cards and the lesser slowing the other one down. Have read some reviews saying that combining cards can be more trouble then it's worth. Especially with different models. But that might have pertained to SLI, and maybe NV-Link is different. Have to wait on some more informed users to clarify.

Pretty sure I'm accurate on the following, but again let's wait for a more knowledgeable user to confirm first.

When there is "x __" that means there is that many number of cards in the system. Setup with NV-Link, which used to be referred to as SLI.

So some data center server configurations like Supermicro's SBI-4119MG-X can have up 40 Tesla T4 GPUs.

Or what seems to be more common for more advanced users round these parts is using a server motherboard with dual cpus and quad gpus like Asus's: Z10PE-D8 WS

And then Asus has the H370 Mining Master that supports 20 PCIe-over-USB GPUs.

Am quite interested in getting more insight on using Server boards, Data Centers, or if/how one of those mining boards would work with V-Ray.

[frogman_pep]

So I made a table of possible cards to add to my system and added a few others just to document for the future, and for any one else who might be interested.

Didn't do much for scaling so using a monitor with 1920 x 1080 is recommend.

Check it out: here

Prices come from what I found at eBay, the double price post was Buy Now | Auction. Large difference so just wanted to note the possibility. I used FP32 (float) performance for TFLOPS since some data I found only had that for some cards.

In terms of the decisions I've made feel like the RTX 2060 Super might be the best bang for it's buck. Being I don't think having a card with more than 8GB is going to help me all that much, as my scenes I'm not expecting to be too large in the near future. Other than overall memory, clock speed and the benchmark score is most important, huh?

Another thing that sparked my interest, is it possible to connect a card without any external connectors like the Tesla V1000 into a normal motherboard and use it in the background purely for rendering while you concurrently use your other card working in the viewport making changes/etc?

[BeneZ]

thanks! I remember you can choose which cards are used for rendering, so I thought it's the same like having one card for viewport and one for render.
At least I read heard this about vray with unreal engine.

[dimension3plus]

Currently I would go for a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER about 500 bucks (€ or $). What would be the advantage of buying a Quadro?

[frogman_pep]

Thanks dimension3plus. I wiill research the different manufactures of that card and see what the better models are, and what prices I can find.

What makes the 2070 Super that much more appealing than the 2060 Super? Meaning is a 384 increase in Cuda cores or around 120 increase in clock speeds worth spending $100 more? I did feel those numbers were significant but the benchmark difference was only 7 points.

For what I'm looking for now it does not appear that buying another Quadro card would have an advantage. It's been mentioned the driver/viewport performance is superior with Quadros and I do a substantial amount of CAD work. I am running a K4200 Quadro card atm, so looking at the price, specs and results it does not seem worth it with my budget/needs to get another, better Quadro card.

[frogman_pep]

So I'm deciding between these three, unless any one has a better suggestion: EVGA RTX 2060 Super (08G-P4-3062-KR) | Gigabyte RTX 2070 Super (N207SWF30C-8GD) | EVGA RTX 2070 Super (08G-P4-3071-KR)

There is a 10% off coupon running on eBay till the 28th, and purchasing through newegg's store with their prices on these 2070s got me thinking it'd be worth to spend a little more.

Mostly because the ability to nvlink another card in the future. Couple questions on that, as there is conflicting/confusing information that I think I've deciphered..?

Can you pair different cards with NVLink? From pugetsystems nvlink bridge compatibility chart:

NVLink Bridge → ↓ Video Card	Quadro GP100 2-Slot Pair	Quadro GV100 2-Slot Pair	Quadro RTX 5000 2/3-Slot	Quadro RTX 6000 2/3-Slot	GeForce RTX 3/4-Slot	Titan RTX 3/4-Slot
Quadro GP100	Works (Tested)	Should Work	Does Not Work	Does Not Work	Does Not Work	Does Not Work
Quadro GV100	Does Not Work	Works (Design)	Does Not Work	Does Not Work	Does Not Work	Does Not Work
Quadro RTX 5000	Does Not Work	Does Not Work	Works (Design)	Does Not Work	Does Not Work	Does Not Work
Quadro RTX 6000	Does Not Work	Should Work	Does Not Work	Works (Tested)	Works (Tested)	Should Work
Quadro RTX 8000	Does Not Work	Should Work	Does Not Work	Works (Design)	Should Work	Should Work
Titan RTX	Does Not Work	Should Work	Does Not Work	Works (Tested)	Works (Tested)	Works (Design)
GeForce RTX 2080	Does Not Work	Should Work	Does Not Work	Works (Tested)	Works (Tested)	Should Work
GeForce RTX 2080 Ti	Does Not Work	Should Work	Does Not Work	Works (Tested)	Works (Tested)	Should Work

So that would mean if I got another GeForce RTX card later to pair with the 2070 it should work, right?

Do the cards have to be from the same manufacture? When I've looked at bridges they show evga bridges and asus rog bridges, etc..

From the V-Ray benchmark results page and my processor, or averaged the result with one close to the i7-6700K.

2060 Super - 296
2070 Super - 304
2070 Super x 2 - 563
2080 Ti - 387
2080 Ti x 2 - around 670

So I've read several times you should always purchase the best card, but if the results are better for two 2070's, you'd also have more specs, and ultimately would be a bit cheaper (accounting with bridge) is there a reason not to do a 2070 pair over one 2080 Ti?

[Micha]

.... is there a reason not to do a 2070 pair over one 2080 Ti?

I decided for me to take best power cards only since I want to have more upgrade options for the next future. Slots and space are limited at a workstation. So, you could ask you what will be your next upgrade steps in the future?

[frogman_pep]

I purchased the evga 2070 super black, should arrive in 1-3 days. After watching this review and the rest of the research it felt for my present needs that would be the best route.

I don't know if you meant this but you reminded me of a descent consideration. Power. Hopefully in the near future I will get another 2070 super and NVLink them. Yet comparing having (2) 2070s vs (1) 2080 Ti it's important to recognize the need for 430 W vs 250 W. Which might call for a larger PSU, and provided both cards will be aligned close to one another it is going to generate a substantial more amount of heat I'd predict. I do have an open case design and will incorporate more fans, investigated gpu watercooling, and possibly placing them on risers and getting a 4 slot bridge (allowing more space for airflow if I'm understanding that correctly). Although probably not going to go to that extent..?

In terms of upgrade steps for the future I've been considering getting a better motherboard with dual processor, or just a better chipset/processor, greater RAM capacity, and 4 PCIe x 16. And whatever gpus will be best at that time. But hey it's time to get really good with V-Ray/etc so upgrading to a system like that will be a necessity and not daydreaming

Thanks for all the help, hopefully this helps any one else in a similar situation, and please add any information that might be useful. Time to be busy with design work, see you around...