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?
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
The motherboard is the PRIME X570-Pro - I am also thinking of a second 4090.
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.
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
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).
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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
I keep hearing this but it never seems to materialize.
Is there anything you can share? Maybe a video testing a large exterior scene, with tons of assets comparing current release and the future one? Will these improvements affect IPR for both CPU and GPU?
There are currently 2 changes in the nightly builds,
- First change is speeding up loading of scenes with many instances, Forest Pack, Chaos Scatter..etc, this affects RTX mode. This change fixes stopping the renders as well, I have tested with @glorybound scene, it works well in his scene. This change slightly reduces GPU memory usage as well
- Second change is speeding up loading of bitmaps on the first rendered frame(we already have caching between animation frames). This change affects all scenes, time to first pixel is improved by around 30 to 50%, and for multiple GPUs the speedup is bigger
This doesn’t affect the standard V-Ray(CPU) renderers, it is more about the gap in time to first pixel between V-Ray and V-Ray GPU. V-Ray GPU is much closer to V-Ray now in time to first pixel
We have many scenes that we used for debugging and testing the fixes, including this one
Scene compilation for this scene was more than 3 minutes, and after these 2 changes, it is around 40 seconds.
Best,
Muhammed
Interesting. Could be. Never did extremely thorough testing, just opened whatever the latest big scene was, turned on fps, orbited around and noted that before changing cards. Then did the same with the new card. The difference was always pretty decent, often doubling fps between x090 generations.
Sounds like we should give GPU another shot. My biggest issue is that things revert so differently you can’t easily switch between them. This is the number one reason we rarely even try GPU. Everything would have to be re tweaked, which can be in an issue in a world where clients A/B each new render with the previous. Also, with high end threadrippers the difference seems minimal. Eager to try it with this 7995wx.
You will need to start the project with V-Ray GPU, as you know V-Ray and V-Ray GPU are different renderers, the results will not match one to one although recently the results should be close enough. We have been trying to avoid objects rendering black for example or the big differences in bump mapping. It should be better in the current and upcoming versions.
Whenever we release a major new version, it is usually a good opportunity to evaluate V-Ray GPU
Best,
Muhammed