Best Hardware Setup for Iray?

[Kayma]

I have a machine that was pretty high-powered for its time (about 8-9 years ago), but I've had no real success with Iray rendering. Up until now, I haven't had the need for photo-realism in my renders. I'm now thinking of getting a new machine (or doing major upgrades on my current one, including a new motherboard, CPU and video card).

Any experts want to weigh in here? What should I upgrade to in order to do Iray renders successfully in a reasonable amount of time? (I hear many people complain that their Iray renders take up to 24 hours.)

[joeblow]

Hi, I have moved into Daz and I get renders done in a few minutes, here are my specs,
AMD Ryzen 7 5700X 8-core processor
32. gb Ram Video
2GB C emv drive

Hope that helps
AnimatedLife3D

[Frank21]

An RTX 4090 if you don't mind not eating for the next 6 months. They're selling for well over $3000AUD where I live... WTF!

[Kayma]

Thanks joeblow! I'm not exactly sure what an "emv drive" is, though. If you were referring to your harddrive, 2 GB seems awfully small for Daz (my own Daz folder is closing in on 200 GB!)

And the 32 Gb video ram? This is on the actual video card, I assume? Which card are you using?

[Kayma]

😮 About the same in Canada. Slightly cheaper in the States (around $2700) I suppose if I were actually making substantial money doing this, it would be a worthwhile investment (and in the States, a tax write-off).

I am nonetheless simply an amateur and hobbyist...hard to justify that expense, even though I could afford it. It's just more than I want to spend on a hobby (sometimes I cringe at how much I've spent at Daz and Rendo over the years 😆 I was able to write some of that off as business expenses when I was doing some illustrations for paying clients - not the case presently, though)

[enjoyify]

The 3060 12GB is a great deal imo. You can sometimes find it used for cheap (from crypto miners). It's what I use. Not nearly as fast as 3080+, but relatively inexpensive and comes with plenty of VRAM.

[yngvarr]

The processor is not very important, any average something like 12400 will do. The video card is the most important, the best choice, as Frank21 already wrote, 4090. 3090 is also very good if you find it at a good price. Next, look at your budget going down the Nvidia line (AMD is not suitable). And as enjoyify wrote, it makes no sense to take something simpler than 3060. The second most important thing is RAM. 32 GB I would call the minimum.

[gaver]

just upgraded myself
Gforce 3060 12GB
32 GB Ram
AMD Ryzen 7 5700G with Radeon Graphics 3.80 GHz
M.2 1TB SSD
And a couple off external drives for the space

USed to be on a 8GB RAM
2GB on GPU took me houres to render a simpel pic.
Same takes about 5 minutes now.

There will always be limitations, no matter how good the computer ( we always want todo what is just out of reach)
I payd about 1000 euros for tis pc, deliverd all ready to go.
I think it is a good quality/quantity ratio, and m more than happy

[Paul (Fuzzy3000)]

At present I am still working oversea. When I eventually return to the UK I will probably use some of my end bonus to get a new, custom, workstation.
At the moment I just have my laptops to play with [still some quite reasonable specs though].

By the time I get back I expect the price of the 4090 to have dropped a bit.
At the moment I have spec'ed a sysytem with cyberpowersystem, in the UK.
As expected, the 4090 is the key cost factor for it.
Having said that, the spec I tested them out with - overall - still comes in favourably for present cost comparisons -

• CPU: Intel® Core™ i9-13900K - 24-Core [8P @ 3.00GHz-5.80GHz / 16E @ 2.20GHz-4.30GHz] - 36MB Cache + UHD Graphics, Ultimate OC Compatible
. 2x 2Tb Nvme drives + 1x 4TB SSD
• HDD: 8TB Seagate BarraCuda SATA-III 6.0Gb/s 5400RPM Hard Drive [+133] (1 Drive)
• MEMORY: 64GB (4x16GB) DDR5/6000mhz Corsair Vengeance RGB Memory [+271]
• MOTHERBOARD: MSI PRO Z790-P WIFI: ATX w/ PCIe 5.0, Wi-Fi 6E, USB 3.2 Gen 2x2
• SOUND: Asus Strix Soar 7.1 PCI-Express Sound Card [+70]
• VIDEO: MSI GeForce® RTX 4090 24GB
£4,964.00

Take another look at this in about a year and might be even better [or chasing 50 series by then 🙂 ]

Boys and their toys eh? [and all the girls here too...]

[Bofadeez]

I have a 3090 and for photorealism I get reasonably complex 4k renders done in about 30-45 minutes. More complicated ones take longer. Huge crowds eat up all my VRAM and crash unless I do a ton of optimization.

For stylized renders, I only run for 1-200 cycles and use the iray denoiser to get a weirdly paint-like effect that I like. I'd imagine you could do that in minutes on any compatible GPU.

[duckface]

RTX4090
Intel I9
64GB RAM
Works pretty good for me

[Paul (Fuzzy3000)]

@Gelstat
NEAT & Tidy... 🙂

Also a fan of Asus.
What case do you have - does it have 51/4 for DVD drive?

[Richard Y.]

@Gelstat
Fairly good~ though the case seems not big enough 😀
And agreed, 3090 is the better choice for the time being. 2 3080 or 3090 are even better than a 4090. The flaw of the latter stopped me as well~

[Richard Y.]

@Gelstat
Ah this one~ got it. You have a miniATX motherboard with a big graphic card. 😀

[Kayma]

Wow...thanks for that detailed reply. I'm wondering at this point if it would just be simpler to get a high-end gaming computer, since games tend to be resource intensive. I'm not a gamer, but I've seen screenshots - looks like the models in those games are pretty detailed and high-res

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