First time GPU purchase advice for design firm with many non-GPU workstations

[grtoffice]

Hello all

We are a 15 person architectural design firm whose standard workstation is a Dell Precision 3460 small form factor, i7-12700 2.1-4.9GHz, 16mb RAM, SSD drive, integrated graphics. These machines cost about $1400 total. I note this because at a certain point buying dedicated render computers may be more affordable than buying high end GPUs.

All our employees split their time between project mgmt (MS office), drafting (AutoCAD), modeling (Rhino 7) and rendering (Vray). Naturally when rendering the other processes are nearly impossible. For this reason I would like to better understand how money would best be spent on a GPU. The sole aim of a dedicated GPU would be to allow us to model and draft while a rendering is running. Our renderings are not excessively complex or large (average size 2000x1800). We have no plan to do animations / VR etc. We are satisfied with the speed of rendering using CPU only but the lost productivity is increasingly an issue.

Some cards that were suggested by Dell are below. Of course I can buy the card from another vendor, I'm giving these as a start point. I know very little about GPUs and would appreciate advice.

Thank you,
Rustam

[grtoffice]

I meant also to ask - there used to be a "low thread priority" radio button that to some extend solved the issue I'm describing. Allowing a rendering to run on the CPU while the computer can still be used for other things, understanding the rendering will take much longer to complete. I searched the vray interface and can not find this anymore, am I missing it?

[Muhammed_Hamed]

Hey grtoffice and welcome to the forums,

I recommend the RTX 3060 12 GB GPU, it will do exactly what you want. You will be able to render and at the same time have another instance of Rhino to model/work, the machine will still be usable
An RTX 3060 is below 400 Euros now, you can buy one or 2. Check if it works well for what you need, then buy more if it all goes smoothly

Couple of things to consider here,
-You will need to make sure the power supply on these machines is at least 600 Watts, for a single RTX 3060
-You will need to make there is enough physical space in your case for an RTX 3060, depending on the model an RTX 3060 can vary quite a lot in size.
-Don't buy video cards from Dell
-V-Ray and V-Ray GPU are 2 different engines, if you move from CPU to GPU your old scenes will not look identical. While the GPU engine has evolved a lot recently having all you need for production, a handful of tools/options are still missing on the GPU side. Features like Caustics for example won't work on GPU

Let me know if you have more questions

Best,
Muhammed

[Muhammed_Hamed]

I meant also to ask - there used to be a "low thread priority" radio button that to some extend solved the issue I'm describing. Allowing a rendering to run on the CPU while the computer can still be used for other things, understanding the rendering will take much longer to complete. I searched the vray interface and can not find this anymore, am I missing it?

This option still exists in V-Ray 6 through the new device selector. You can launch it from the V-Ray menu under "Tools"
There is a checkbox next to each rendering device that says Low Priority. This works in the same way as before, what is new is that you can set "low priority" per rendering device. It is helpful for people with multiple GPUs

Best,
Muhammed