Invest in a Ryzen render node or GTX 1080 Ti?

[tinybot]

I'm a new, small one-person shop, doing all of my renders on a single workstation via CPU (6 core, 12 thread i7-6800K). GTX 1060 3GB video card. My focus is primarily on interior stills.

I've been drooling over the new Ryzen CPU offering from AMD. But am also a bit conflicted with the positive trend I'm seeing with V-Ray RT/GPU for production rendering. And now with the GTX 1080 Ti, I find myself wondering which direction would be a better investment.

Option A: Build a new Ryzen system and purchase a render node license. Pros: Don't have to learn a new workflow. Setting up Distributed Rendering seems fairly straightforward. Serves as a back-up workstation in case of primary workstation failure. Cons: More expensive than option B.

Option B: Purchase a GTX 1080 Ti and add it to my existing system. Pros: Less expensive. Cons: Learn & switch to a GPU workflow (no idea what's involved).

The main priority for me is getting render times to a minimum. So even if Option A is more expensive, but results in appreciably lower render times, I'm happy to go that way.

An interesting twist might be... that TWO 1080 Ti's might still be less expensive than Option A, and I wonder what kind of render times I might see then? My motherboard has two GPU slots, I could remove the 1060 and replace with two 1080 Ti's.

[glorybound]

A lot smarter guys around her than me, but I think you'll need a few more of those cards to make it worth your while. Plus, RT doesn't support everything, yet, so make sure it does what you need it to do. I think the GPU VS. CPU debate is still a toss right now with the CPU still way in the lead. I mean, you can probably do simple scenes really fast with GPU, however, start turning on more complex stuff and you can forget about it. Someone will probably totally disagree; we'll see.

[piotrus3333]

I sugest you get one 1070 and just try it for yourself. and if your scenes fit into 3 gigs of video ram than just use what you have. I've run into some limitations of RT GPU, it very much depends on your workflow.

[hoch5]

Buying a render node is probably more convenient regarding the workflow.

Pros:
- you'll be able to work with backburner, so you could jump on the next project while your node is crunching the pixels
- facing a tight deadline you could use dr (distributed rendering) using both boxes to nail down the job
- you don't have to change your workflow a lot, at least not the way you work with materials, textures, models etc.
- expandable with extra nodes in the future

Cons:
- more expensive, keep in mind you'll also need another node license of v-ray
- you have to set up a storage system in a way, at least you'll have to share/map the project folder and your library with all the textures etc.
- it's more work to administrate the second computer as well (remote desktop is your friend)
- obviously, the computers need to be connected via network and you need space somewhere

Jumping on a RT/gpu setup has some dis-/advanteges as well

Pros:
- aside from the graphics card(s) you don't need extra invests
- easy to set up
- fast

Cons:
- for detailed, especially super highres interior images with lots of geometry and textures you certainly have to change your workflow a bit
- it's a somewhat waste of your cpu power, since it stays idle during rendering via rt/gpu
- if you don't keep a dedicated gpu for the ui, your workstation is more or less occupied during rendering and not very responsive for example to check emails or something similar
- since you wrote your mainboard offers 2 gpu slots only, you might be already stuck with one extra gpu

I might forgot some points...

It depends a lot on your workflow and what way you'd feel easier to go.

[tinybot]

I found these great resources from another thread response posted by Blago:

A Short Guide to GPU Rendering with V-Ray RT:
http://dabarti.com/vfx/short-guide-t...with-v-ray-rt/

Official Chaos Group Guide to GPU Rendering PDF:
https://labs.chaosgroup.com/index.ph...gpu-rendering/

Made for some wonderful, evening reading

[tinybot]

First of all, thank you everyone for such great and insightful responses!

Really gave me a lot to think about.

For now, especially as someone who is more at the junior/beginner level, I just don't think I'm prepared to invest the extra time and effort to adopt a GPU workflow. I have enough challenges working through issues as it is as a newcomer, I don't think I want to compound that with troubleshooting incompatibilities and memory optimizations. Spending a few extra $$ to purchase an additional render workstation and render node license seems to be the way to go (for now!).

[theedge]

Smart choice. GPU rendering is a viable choice only if you're going to use it on projects from A to Z. There's no way you can switch between CPU and GPU mid-project, unless you're working on really simple scenes with basic material setups.

[ripe]

I bought a 1070 to add to my 2x780ti GPU's for Vray RT - and it's not all it's cracked up to be. Granted a 1080 ti will be quicker etc - but not by as much as you may think.... my 1070 is not far off a 1080 in terms of cores / performance and I've found it's only marginally quicker than one 780ti....

Go for the cpu render node all day long - I have a 5960 rig that runs as my render node for distributed rendering - and its ace - just speeds up everything . I only use RT as a lighting / workflow tool to help with scene setup.

[JezUK]

It's early days for me, but I recently bought 2 x 1080 ti's and feel like I'm running the software the way it was designed.

Cannot get over the beauty of RT - I get an instant feedback is IPR that I've never experienced before.

Also, the hardware scale-ability (for GPU) is affordable for my current budgets - meaning, I've put in 1 card at a time and the money chunks have been palatable for me to swallow.

My plan is to populate my motherboard with 4 x 1080ti's and simply enjoy my workflow even more.

Yes, for 4 x 1080ti's I could buy another rendernode, maybe 5960x based (I don't really believe so) - but I don't know how 4 x 1080ti's would compare with 1 x 5960x.

I also prefer the 'one box solution'