Processor Upgrade

[glorybound]

Currently, I have an AMD Ryzen 9 5900X, and it looks like the only upgrade for me (per my motherboard) would be the Ryzen 9 3950X—I would go from 12 to 16 cores, but from what I see, the clock speed is less. Mine is 4 Ghz and the 5900X is 3.5 Ghz. One other confusion is that I see the 3950X from $400 to $900, and I don't know why there is such a large difference in price from different websites. Would it be worth the upgrade?

[Pixelcon]

https://benchmark.chaos.com/vray/v6/...d=5043&id=5262

[Muhammed_Hamed]

What motherboard is that?
If it is running the 5900X, it should be able to run the 5950X which is 16-core, 32-threads
The 3950X is an older generation, the 5900x is much better.

Moving to a 5950X should give you a good upgrade of performance. Around 25% for rendering

Best,
Muhammed

[glorybound]

The motherboard is the PRIME X570-Pro - I am also thinking of a second 4090.

[Joelaff]

Alternately, get a whole new system and use the old one as a render node.

[glorybound]

Alternately, get a whole new system and use the old one as a render node.

Yeah, but I just put this one into service 6-months ago. It's working great, but anything I can do to make it a little faster would be awesome. Processors are cheap, so I might do that first.

[Muhammed_Hamed]

The motherboard is the PRIME X570-Pro - I am also thinking of a second 4090.

Pretty good board!
The Ryzen 9 5950X should be a good upgrade, and you can sell your current CPU. It should cover more than half of what you pay for the new one

On another note, a second 4090 should work well as long as you have 1200 Watts PSU and 4x 8pins connectors(you cannot swap power supply cables, you will need a new one if you don't have enough 8 pins)

That being said, Vantage does benefit from a second GPU, but the scaling is not linear, my suggestion is to get a 4060ti 16 GB as a second GPU to connect your monitors and use for viewport performance. So Windows and other apps don't take a chunk of memory and performance of your 4090
A 4060ti 16 GB is 400 Euros, it is currently the best value for money. It could be used for GPU rendering as well if you will not be using the machine while rendering

Best,
Muhammed

[glorybound]

If money wasn't the issue, which would be best? The 4060 or 4090? One will be external, using a riser.

[Joelaff]

If money wasn't the issue, which would be best? The 4060 or 4090? One will be external, using a riser.

Guess

Do a web search for 4060 vs 4090 (or 4060Ti).

[glorybound]

I realize that the 4090 is a better card on paper. However, I am interested in getting someone's opinion who actually knows the application. The 4060 was recommended, so it would be nice to know why and if it was just a cost factor.

[Joelaff]

I assume it was because they are much cheaper. I have a couple 4090s and a 4070 I think it is (in separate machines). The 4070 is definitely not as fast in the viewport with large datasets. I guess it depends on what you need. No clue how the 4070 and 4060 compare. I don't really do GPU rendering. I just like a 4090 for the viewports. Should probably move the other 4090 to this main box as well, and have one dedicated to any CUDA stuff.

[glorybound]

I switched from CPU to GPU but found myself returning to CPU. The GPU just seems too unstable to get anything done, and I don't want to keep throwing money at it. Right now, it takes 15 minutes each time I cancel a render, which can significantly affect productivity. There seem to be two parties, one for CPU and one for GPU, and both are fanboys of their party. From the chatter, I hear that most people use Corona now, and studios are asking for people who use it, not V-Ray. As you know, Corona is in the CPU camp. Maybe two dedicated 4090's and a third dedicated to my monitor? The VRAM cap is still an issue with some of my exteriors, so no matter how many GPUs I throw at it, that bottleneck is still there. I am just looking for the best coarse of action to speed my workflow up.

[Muhammed_Hamed]

If money wasn't the issue, which would be best? The 4060 or 4090? One will be external, using a riser.

4090 of course!
4060ti 16 GB is more about value for money, you will be getting nearly half the 4090 performance for 400 Euros, it is basically a 3090 on the cheap
4090s these days are around 2200 Euros, so paying more than 5x for twice the performance you get of the 4060ti

Keep in mind 4060ti has multiple variants with 8 GB or 16 GB memory, it needs to be the 16-GB variant

Best,
Muhammed

[Muhammed_Hamed]

The 4070 is definitely not as fast in the viewport with large datasets. I guess it depends on what you need. No clue how the 4070 and 4060 compare. I don't really do GPU rendering. I just like a 4090 for the viewports. Should probably move the other 4090 to this main box as well, and have one dedicated to any CUDA stuff.

Do you mean 3Ds Max viewport?
Could it be about GPU memory, the 4070 has 12 GB. Getting close to the memory ceiling will tank the performance
3Ds Max viewport used to not care about high-end GPUs, I wouldn't see a noticeble difference between say a 3090 and 3070 for example. Hence we used to recommend mid-range GPUs for viewport, specially that they would have a lot of GPU memory these days like the 4060ti

I'm interested to test again, I have a 4070 in my office.

Best,
Muhammed

[Muhammed_Hamed]

The VRAM cap is still an issue with some of my exteriors, so no matter how many GPUs I throw at it, that bottleneck is still there. I am just looking for the best coarse of action to speed my workflow up.

This should be better now with the new Out Of Core mode for textures, it reduces GPU memory usage drastically. All your bitmaps will be stored in system memory, with minimal impact on performance. In your case you have a motherboard and processor that uses PCIe Gen 4, V-Ray GPU will use this bandwidth to share data between the GPU and system memory

The bigger challenges with exterior scene are time to first pixel and stopping the render, if the scene is big enough. We have been working on this in H1 of this year, expect improvements in the upcoming release

Best,
Muhammed