Been looking at Nvidia cards, but it's annoying because for their nice cards they don't have 8GB versions.

Like this, which is one of the best cards in terms of value and performance :

http://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Nvidia-GTX-970/Rating/2577

About £270.00 now.

There are some 12GB floating around but the prices are astronomical and probably overkill anyway.

I've been playing with Daz Studio and a good new development is GPU rendering. Good yes, but only for nVidia cards, although you can do the same thing using the CPU - my CPU was on full whack doing that render I posted in the gallery.

I thought this was an interesting comparison for the best nVidia vs the newer AMD :

http://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Nvidia-GTX-970-vs-AMD-R9-390/2577vs3481

Not much in it, but the AMD has more VRAM.

This comment I found interesting too...

QuoteThe increased VRAM will rarely help even at ultra high resolutions and in any case, most 4K gamers are likely to seek more GPU power than the R9 390 has to offer.

I like that quote  

No one will ever need more than a 1 GIG card, they said 3 years ago.

I don't know mate, it's going to come down to what you want to do with the card, that will determine how much VRAM you will need.

AC unity already goes over 4 GIG in places, so when they say you will not need it, I disagree 100% but ... I am a bit of a part time gamer, you are not I know this, if you run out of VRAM you really notice it in games.

I don't think it's a good time to buy a card, unless you really have to, DX12 is going to have a large impacted on game engines, saying that an Nvidia card might be good for your rendering in Daz Studio, it's a shame Daz Studio doesn't support AMD card GPU's, maybe they will in the future ?

I agree, not really the prime time to get a card, I'm still aimed at the new year to see what happens.

I've been playing more games lately, still mainly LOTRO though - I'm going to look for a newer RPG MMO though because it's getting a little repetitive now, but it's still fun to game with the gang.

I have a lot of uses for GPUs aside from playing games. Yes there is the rendering with DAZ etc but also Unity - it means I can push that more. Also for programming. A while back I was playing around with parallel processing on a GPU but did not get very far. I want to get back to that too at some point.

There is an alternative renderer for DAZ that qyou can buy for about $30 - I think I will pick that up later and give it a try. It's supposed to use the GPU too, the renders do look very nice that I have seen.

So yes, $30 for a software solution versus up to £300 for a hardware solution is the thing. Anyway the new (Nvidia slanted) renderer can work on my CPU as I said, so what's a couple of minutes...

After looking at all the goodies for Daz now I have come to the conclusion that I would be better off with nVidia. It's pretty clear that's the way Daz is heading. Some of the renders I have seen using nVidia are outstanding, far better than I have come up with so far.

It seems the rendering programs target nVidia a lot - there's another renderer I am interested in too and that's for nVidia only.

I don't play games as much as you Data, I'm more about making things on my PC. Gaming for me comes in fits and starts.

I was looking on Scan and they have four figure cards on there. Amazing but beyond my means. I've upped my budget to £500 and am looking at something like the GTX 980 Ti now. I reckon I can save that by the new year. I do like my modelling and rendering and with a beast like that I would be set for a while.

I'll ask over on Daz if they think that's a good card to aim for and get some ideas hopefully.

It's a 6GB card and apparently plays 4K fine, so I should have no problem with games anyway as a nice side effect.

I understand your decision Freddy, will be good for your Daz quest 

But I have to say ...
I too make things on my PC and only game part time, but my problem is when I start a game I normally have to finish it, at least once 

I don't want to see any benchmark scores from that card, it will only annoy me    

Oh yes, I didn't mean to take anything away from you, I know you make music and do graphics work too. And all the web design as well. You are a creative person. I'm just rationalising my thoughts for what I spend my time doing.

My trouble with games is I start them and never finish

When I get into something I become a bit obsessed with it, then games fall to the wayside 

OK no benchmarks then.

Time for bed !

Go for it, if it renders as good as it sounds like then it's going to make your work stand out even more than it does already 

I know I'm off topic but it is sort of linked.

May be a couple of naughty words. Though it is spelt FAQ.

 

I actually asked for people with experience with nVidia cards over on the Daz art forum to share their experience. Whilst some people did contribute it ended up with people just listing their specs, so I did not bother further.

This video makes me think of that experience - I mean I thought I was getting an awesome nVidia Ti, but then other people chime in with dual Titans and the like - which costs a couple of grand. Some of these guys and girls have three or four cards 

To be fair some of these people might be modelling and rendering for a living, so it makes more sense that they would need the speed.

I still think I will like my Ti 

Doesn't this really boil down to having a PC that does what you need it to do and do it fast enough to keep you happy ?

I've built i3's with on-board graphics on nice little motherboards with SSD's - they are easily fast enough to run most day to day tasks, they feel very quick to use and boot super quick too. The best bit is that the entire PC would cost less than an i7 CPU and I honestly don't think you would even notice it when browsing the web, sending e-mails etc.

Anyway things have changed with windows 10, I have noticed that games are taking quite a lot less Vram in the new OS, F1 2013 has almost halved the amount of Vram needed, so yeah an 8 GIG card might actually be over kill in 10.

Yes it's horses for courses.

My Ti will speed things up, it just remains to be seen how much.

When I render currently all of my CPU is used, this makes it difficult for other things to run - it's very slow on the net for example. So by going to GPU rendering, I can have use of my PC again for things like that. It's not a problem at the moment as I am doing small renders. But it's a problem when it renders for 40 minutes and I'm stuck waiting.

Interesting observation on the VRAM. I think 6GB will do for me for now.

I think I may pick up the nVidia soon rather than wait till the new year.

Sounds like you need a stonking GPU for your renders then, it has to be quicker than the CPU could do it too, you would certainly think so.

Just a couple of things that spring to mind that I thought I would mention. 

You could set the affinity of your render program to use some of the CPU cores and leave some for other tasks.

All these multicore CPU's and stonking GPU's start to increase power consumption by quite a considerable amount. You know me, do it with as little power as you can. 

Saying that, if your heart is set on a Ti then who am I to disagree 

Yep I just asked on the Daz forum and they also told me about the affinity, so I stopped it from using one core for now 

I'm not too worried about the power really - it's not going full whack all day as yet

Just done a quick comparison of VRAM usage in win7 and win10 with F1 2013 which is a DirectX 11 game. The game isn't exactly taxing on VRAM usage either. Same quality settings and all I did was start the game and go sit in one of the cars. Kept them as identical as I could, once you start driving round a track the VRAM usage moves all over the place, this should be quite an accurate result but not exactly scientific.

Results:
Windows 7   962MB usage

Windows 10 759MB usage

Windows 10 is using less VRAM than 7 on older DirectX 11 games, interestingly the GPU usage is identical between 7 and 10.

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Interesting, thanks 

So presumably DX12 shifts something back to the CPU without an impact on FPS. Nice.