Not sure where to ask this what info I need to include. I will list my current system specs below. I do mostly Revit modeling, but also do renderings and animations using 3ds Max and Vray/Vantage. In the past I have had problems with using Vantage because my current video card is an RTX card with only 8GB of VRAM. I cant afford to spend thousands of dollars on a video card. But I need to be able to bring scenes in from 3ds Max into vantage. The number one problem I have is I dont know how to determine how much Vram I would actually need. I would hate to spend $1,000 on a 16GB card only to realize that wont be enough. So I am trying to research this to figure out what route to go. Looks like maybe I could go with a 4000 series RTX (maybe even do 2 hooked together) or a quadro. The quadro cards look like they get horribly expensive really fast. The RTX cards (even if I purchased 2 and used the SLI link) are more affordable. Im just looking for advice and opinions at this point. I would like to purchase something sooner rather than later. Thank you in advance for any insight people are willing to share. If any additional info is needed please let me know.
Vantage doesn’t utilize an SLI link. It is best to have two cards, one for MAX and your monitor and one for Vantage. If you optimize for GPU, a 24-GB card should be enough.
Thank you for your reply. Do any of the RTX cards even come with 24GB? The only ones that I saw go up to 16GB. Its possible I just didn’t see any. Or would I need to go with a quadro card? I wouldn’t be against going with 2 cards. I could afford 1k - 2k I just dont want to get into 5k or higher. Some of those get super spendy. But the firm I am working for now wants me to start doing some fairly high end vis for marketing etc.I stand corrected. If I bought one RTX 4090 would it be possible to run MAX and monitors on my current 2080 super (which works just fine) and vantage on the 4090 24GB?
Bobby’s advice is spot on.
You can use your current GPU for your monitors and 3Ds Max, and buy a second 24 GB card dedicated to GPU rendering. You will have plenty of VRAM to work with
See the setup for multi-GPUs here
Currently with one 8 GB GPU, Max will take nearly half of that to run the viewport and Windows, leaving you only 4 GB for your GPU rendering.
If you don’t want to pay for an expensive 4090, there are cheaper 16 GB cards available. No need for the expensive Quadro cards
Bobby’s advice is spot on.
You can use your current GPU for your monitors and 3Ds Max, and buy a second 24 GB card dedicated to GPU rendering. You will have plenty of VRAM to work with
See the setup for multi-GPUs here
Currently with one 8 GB GPU, Max will take nearly half of that to run the viewport and Windows, leaving you only 4 GB for your GPU rendering.
If you don’t want to pay for an expensive 4090, there are cheaper 16 GB cards available. No need for the expensive Quadro cards​
Thank you to you both for your prompt response and the information, appreciate it. I ordered an RTX 4090 and it will be here Saturday. Yeah my current card doesn’t cut it. I have set up GPU and also hybrid renders inside just MAX and it seems to do ok. But Vantage wouldn’t even begin to bring my scenes in with my current hardware. I’m glad I don’t have to go to the quadro cards. Thanks again for your insight, much appreciated.
So I did get the 4090 card, it is a monster lol. I also ordered a bigger power supply and a support rod to help support this heavy thing. I am hoping to install it this weekend. My question now is Im not sure which slot would be the best for which card. There isnt a lot of room in between them either, am hoping I dont end up needing a different board. The top most slot is a PCIEX16, middle one is PCIEX8 (not sure I could get a card in middle one with out running into card that is mounted in top). Bottom one is PCIEX4. My current 8gb card is in the top one right now. I do understand some about data lanes. Seems the x8 slot and the x16 would be ideal, but I doubt that is physically possible. I also dont want to create a bottleneck.
Old card stays in the topmost slot, this is where you connect your monitors
New card should physically fit in the second PCIE slot, don’t worry if the cards are too close. The 4090 doesn’t produce a lot of heat during rendering
Your motherboard is on PCIE Gen 4.0 both cards will run in x8 bandwidth which is more than enough
Second configuration, if the 4090 doesn’t physically fit in the second slot
4090 in first slot, not connected to monitors
old card is in the third slot, this bandwidth comes from the X570 chipset and should work just fine. You will not use this card in rendering anyway
let us know how this goes, you will need to enable Above 4G Decoding in the bios settings
For the power supply, you need 800 Watts or more. As long as your power supply have enough PCIE connectors for both GPUs
I guess you need 4x 8pins for the 4090 and 2x 8pin for the 2080 Super..
Thank you for your response. I was short 2 8 pin connectors on my current power supply. It was a 850 watt. I oversized it when I built this system with the thought of upgrading later, guess that plan didn’t quite work out. I ordered a 1,000 watt so I should be covered plenty. It has plenty of connectors on it as well. I haven’t tried to physically install the card yet. It looks like it might be close but will try this weekend. I will post a reply after this weekend and let you know how it went. Thanks again.
I noticed one of my cards hasn’t been spinning at all. I checked, and my system only lists one card. I unplugged and plugged everything back in, and both powered up, but only one at a time. I ordered a new 4X8 RTX cord, but until then, is there anything else I can check? I don’t see anything in the BIOS about video or graphics. Everything worked fine for a while, so something happened!
The installation went fairly well. Had some other issues. I think the first power supply I plugged in was somehow bad (luckily I didn’t have the 4090 installed yet) I think it took out my liquid cooler pump. Long story short I ended up buying yet another power supply and a newer and maybe better liquid cooler from Corsair. Now its running good I think. I followed your advice on settings etc. One thing I am confused about though. I am still learning Vantage, although it doesn’t seem nearly as complex as v-ray or max. I had it installed several days before I got the card in and I was just using the pre-installed scenes that it comes with. I originally had a DLSS quality slider on the top toolbar, and since I put this other card in it is no longer there. I did go into the Render Devices and set it to the 4090, which I assume is what I want. I know the first time I launched vantage with both cards a dialog did come up about dual graphic cards and now cant remember what it said. But I think it is all set up fine. I didn’t uninstall my previous nvidia software (control panel and geforce experience) because I figured I still had the other card. I did install the graphic driver package for the new card though. Thanks for your help, was much appreciated. I’m excited to see what Vantage will do for me, since I have had a lot of issues using cpu rendering inside of max with V-ray.
This would only happen if you use cables from a different power supply, the pump most likely gave up. It is common to happen with and without reasons
I’m glad it all went well otherwise!
@npg Is it related to running multiple GPUs with Vantage?
Thanks for the help!
The DLSS slider is only there while this denoiser is the primary denoiser choice in Edit->Preferences->Render Defaults. It may also be unavailable if the driver is older than 537.
Like all Chaos products we have documentation here: Chaos Vantage
​
Make sure to explicitly select the 4090 from Edit->Render devices (then restart the app and check the device shown in the bottom right of the status bar). This is not related to the DLSS question, but it is the optimal choice because the 2080 is over 4 times slower than 4090 and even if it wasn’t slower, in Vantage multi-gpu mode you’re limited by the smaller card’s memory because both have to fit the scene in their memory. The 2080 will take the hit from Max and the OS (browsers and whatnot) leaving the 4090 free for Vantage or V-Ray GPU.
The 4090 doesn’t produce a lot of heat during rendering
I dunno about that, I use a 4090 with Vantage and it radiates quite a bit of heat. The important thing for the setup discussed here is to keep the 4090 cooled well, meaning with good access to fresh air. Let the 2080 overheat a bit if necessary, it will just throttle down.
When using a single GPU Vantage is not really affected the PCI-e speed (lane count). V-Ray GPU uses the bus much more, though I’m not sure if it could be a bottleneck. It’s possible with the 4090 because it’s quite a beast.
Ok, now I see where the denoiser setting are. That makes sense now. I am still in the learning process as far as Vantage goes. I do like what I see so far. I seem to have taken a major performance hit with Revit now. So much that its a problem now orbiting in 3d which is kinda important for my job and especially when in meetings doing live presentations. It never acted this way before. As far as I can tell, Revit is just listing the 2080 as the graphic card. So I am going to have to find a solution to this problem. What I sort of feared from the beginning is that my 2080 super becomes the bottleneck of my system. And if my solution is dropping in another 4090, then Im not against that but was hoping I didnt have to go that route just because of the obvious…those cards are spendy. But if that is what I need to do then I am willing to do that.
This is not expected to happen, you should get the same performance you had before. Having 2 GPUs will not decrease the performance of the 2080
Maybe try a clean install of drivers
I did a little bit of a “test”. I pulled out my 2080 and just my 4090 in the top slot and decided to temporarily just run with the one card. Revit is doing the exact same thing (not allowing me to orbit around in 3d). But I can orbit around in fairly large scenes in Max just fine, so its just a Revit thing. As far as I can tell the computer runs just fine with that one exception. I will probably put the 2080 back in unless you think I would be better running with a pair of 4090’s. Not sure another 4090 would physically go into second slot without them literally being against each other. I can pull out the nvidia software and reinstall it and see what it does. I noticed that the driver listed on the banner at top of V-ray GPU page is older than the one I’m running. I was running version 560.94 and the page says 551.86. As far as I can tell Nvidia doesn’t even offer that driver anymore.
UPDATE: So I put my 2080 card back in since I only removed it for a test and removing didn’t solve anything. I now have the 2080 super back in top slot and 4090 is in 2nd slot. I uninstalled ALL nvidia software including drivers and re-installed driver package which also re-installed control panel and ge-force experience. I still have the problem with Revit, but everything else seems to be working just fine. The only way that I can describe the problem in Revit is if I am in a 3D view and go to orbit it seems to have a “delay”. It will orbit but is very “choppy” and very slow. I have NEVER had Revit do this before. According to The options that are in revit, it says it is using the 2080 as the graphics card, so I’m a little confused as to why its acting this way. But being able to orbit in 3D in Revit is a big deal to me, so I hope I can find a solution. I also followed your guide for setting the control panel up for multiple GPU’s. Thanks for your time by the way. I think I have narrowed the “Revit problem” down. I think its something screwy with this particular file. Other Revit files work just fine. I dont know why this file is suddenly doing this. It is a powerhouse building that I have been involved with in developing and it used to work fine and now has a bug but oh well, thats life I guess.
