GPU Recommendation for 3ds max viewport speed - NO production GPU rendering

[dlparisi]

This isn't a Vray specific question but is specific to 3ds max so I'm posting it here rather than the hardware forum. I currently have GTX 970 and am looking to upgrade the GPU to something a bit more current. The rest of my system is a Threadripper 3970x w/ 64 GB ram with another DR machine (dual Xeon 2696-v3, 64gb) so all of my rendering is done via CPU so I don't foresee switching to GPU any time soon. I'm running dual monitors @ 1920x1200 and quite often have a couple instances of max open. My scenes can get quite large (at least for me), usually on the order of 50-125 polygons/vertices with lots of proxies, railclone, forestpack, etc. I usually get something between 5-15 FPS according to the viewport stats in max. I also often render with the denoiser active so I'm looking to have that sped up as well.

I feel like some of the sluggishness in my current system is the GPU, due to its age/speed as well as it's limited 4GB of RAM. With prices finally seeming to fall on GPU's I'm exploring an upgrade to a newer 30 series card. Most likely, any current series card is going to see some improvement but I'm debating between the different ones and can't seem to find much info on what might be the best fit - every review seems to focus on rendering speed using some benchmark (VRAY, corona, blender, etc), not viewport speed. My initial thought was to do a simple/cheap upgrade to a 3060 which has what feels like a would be a great increase in ram (12gb). Of course, price is always an issue, but raising the stakes to something like a 3060TI, 3070 or 3070TI with more cuda cores but less memory (8gb) is an option as well. I'd need to bump it up even further to a 3080 get more cores AND more memory (at least 10gb) but the cost is becoming somewhat prohibitive, unless it would truly be noticeable over the other options.

Any thoughts/recommendations are appreciated. Thx.

[^Lele^]

I'd go for the 3060, without question.
I've recently returned to a 2080Ti (which was dead, and then not anymore.) from a 1080, and the difference, fancy features aside, is night and day.
On a 4k monitor, i'm back to smooth dragging of windows, to smooth mouse motion, and quick viewport/Ui response in max.
I'd assume a 3060 (Ti or not) would be on par, and the 12gb of ram will surely do you and your workflow no harm.

I'd say if you're not rendering, or planning on gaming, anything above the 3060 is firmly in the land of diminishing returns.

[dlparisi]

Thanks Lele. I've been doing a bit more research since yesterday and have come to pretty much the same conclusion about diminishing returns. I figured I'd try the 3060 Non Ti) and see how it goes and be sure and buy from somewhere with a generous return/exchange policy.