GTX 1050 Ti still any use?
Ladyfyre
Posts: 58
Hello old friends, I've popped in hoping for some advice as regards to my old trusty desktop that was pretty swift in its day and still does everything I need it to better than my newish laptop apart from the actual rendering of 3d scenes in Daz studio. That along with my health is why I've not been able to really produce any artwork over the last 2/3 years.
I'd love a full mb/CPU/ram/GPU upgrade but that's out of the question at this moment.
This is the current spec:
AMD Phenom(tm) II X6 1055T
MB M4A88T-V EVO/USB3
20gb ddr1333 ram
GeForce GT 630 1tb
Samsung SSD 860 EVO 500GB + 3x 2&3tb standard hdd
800w PSU
24 inch HD monitor (with second one spare hoping to also hook up to system soon as I get the room moved round to accomodate it.)
OS: Win 7 64bit Pro
I have a graphics tablet, usb microphone and speakers permernantly plugged in which also draw from the PSU.
My oh and myself used to build pcs years ago and this was the last one we did about 8 years ago, I'm pretty out of the loop. I use this machine for web design, Photoshop, illustrator, browsing, email, watching Netflix, 3d modelling and texture work and rendering as well as the very occasional Sims game.
Budget is tight and I'm hoping to spend as little as possible add I've been too I'll to work for a while (CFS/me flare) I'm looking at the gforce 1050ti 4gb but I'm not sure if it will be that much of a step up and the 1060 3gb (too little vram?) Then maybe I could stretch to the 1060 6gb but that will be a push. I'm not sure if they will work in my current system though.
Does anyone have any advice please baring in mind that money is really tight at the mo? Thank you for taking the time to read! ~Angela
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Comments
As someone currently using a GTX 1050 Ti, I can tell you that the 4 GB of VRAM can be a real squeeze with newer figures. High resolution textures eat VRAM really fast, and even for relatively simple scenes a lot of the time I end up having to go through a scene and downsize any textures I can get away with and strip out unneeded maps. (Or sometimes make use of less demanding older figures in the background). Even then I can't always fit scenes I want to into the graphics memory.
The GTX 1060 6GB would be a considerable improvement to both the ability to fit scenes into VRAM, and to your rendering speed (quite possibly as much as double) - however, unfortunately, not an option for me, as I need a fairly compact machine, and they don't do low profile versions of the 1060.
As for compatibility - generally graphics cards are fairly broadly compatible with any motherboard, and the 1060 should be well within the capacities of an 800W PSU (assuming said PSU has auxiliary power connectors, as cards over 75 W cannot run solely through power provided by the PCI slot). You may need to check case space though. The 1060 isn't very big, but if like me you have a low profile case, it won't fit.
EDIT: To summarise, I'd say that the GTX 1050 Ti is better than nothing, but I'd still really recommend more.
If you have a PC with a limited power supply, the 1050's actually work fairly well.
I previously had a 1050ti and loved it. It's a great card if you're building a machine on a budget.
The 4gb of ram will be a problem, but if you get Scene Optimizer to reduce/remove textures it's not as big a problem.
If you have the money in your budget, I would recommend a card with more ram, especially if you render professionally.
If you're doing light rendering as a hobbyist, 1050ti will serve you well.
Just keep in mind, the trend among PA's is bigger and bigger texture maps, and more of them. There are already a few products on the site that on their own won't fit on a 4gb card without significant texture map reduction. A year from now it's likely you won't be able to render many new products (unreduced) on a 4gb card.
Hopefully PAs will start including reduced texture versions of their products, but I wouldn't count on it.
Resource management is very important regardless of how big or small you want to make your scene. I would highly recommend my product - https://www.daz3d.com/resource-saver-shaders-collection-for-iray - which is designed for helping anyone reduce the resource usage in your scene, starting with your characters. Since money is tight for you, I recommend waiting until March Madness to get the RSSC if you do. It will be on sale when my new set is released in March.
There is a thread from Nov about it if you want to read over it - https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/287461/resource-saver-shaders-collection-for-iray/p1
I have a card with 6GB; it isn't enough.
Yes I manage, but it is easy to drop to CPU above a very basic scene.
The GTX 1660 is about to launch which is the new generation 1060. people will upgrade from the 1060 to it. This should result in a fair number of used 4Gb 1060's showing up on eBay and craigslist. I'd wait about a month and then check those sites for a 4Gb 1060 at the same price as a new 1050ti. Then definitelt get Scene Optimizer I use it whenever I have a problem with a scene.
Thank you everyone for all of your input, I really appreciate it. After reading it all I'm going to to try and stretch to the 1060 6gb but will check my MB first to see if I have any power connectors left free.
@MattyManx that looks very useful, I'll add it to my basket and pick it up asap thank you.
95% of my renders are very simple scenes these days as I tend to do a lot of postwork and aim for a very stylised look. I usually use one of the the horse models and/or Genesis 1 or even Victoria 4 as after all these years I'm so behind it's what I'm familiar and comfortable with :-)
Well, if you're solely doing simple scenes with older resources, the GTX 1050 Ti would probably serve you acceptably, given older assets generally have much smaller texture resolutions, which is the part of a render that most eats memory, so 4GB VRAM goes a lot further as far as scene complexity with these older models. Still, if there's any question about whether you might want to use newer resources or more complex scenes either now or in the foreseeable future, I would definitely suggest upgrading beyond there. I'm acutely aware of the limitations of the GTX 1050 Ti's VRAM in these contexts (and I don't really need to have that much in a scene before it can take hours to render).
My brother sticks to the principle of "Buy nice, or buy twice" - if/when he's upgrading computer parts, he always upgrades to the best components he can, because it's cheaper than doing lots of incremental upgrades, it means a better computer now, and it means longer before he next needs to upgrade.
It's not your MB you need to check, it's your PSU, as long as there is a free 6 or 6+2 pin cable available you're good to go (for the 1060).
When Daz Studio first used iRay I had a 2 GB GT 710, getting a GTX 1050ti was an amazing jump.
Out of curiosity: how did you get 20 GB of RAM to work on that MB?
i have been using a GTX 1060 6 gig for a couple years now. I have had no problems doing renders. Though I don't render huge scenes much. usually only a couple figures, and use hdri and Image backgrounds. It really cuts down render times too. With these technuiqes.
Hi everyone! Sorry for the delay in my reply. I read all the advice on here (thank you all!) and took the jump and bought the GeForce® GTX 1060 WINDFORCE OC 6G and fitted it this afternoon.
I have to say that I am blown away with it so far but that is probably because I have been limping my ancient basic card along for the last few years. There was a basic iRay render that I did a few weeks ago of a single HW horse that took over an hour on both GPU+ CPU and I had to cancel it on about 80% finished so I could use my computer and this now rendered today in full in about 3/4 minutes :-)
@Pack58 there are 3 4gb sticks and a single 8gb stick making the 20gb in this pc, not ideal I know but I had the extra ram laying around from my other pc whose mb died and it seems to run better with it. Origionally there were 4x4gb sticks but one went bad.
Thank you all again for your help :-)
With older CPUs, you may find that having both the cpu and graphics card selected for rendering is actually slowing the render down slightly. If you've still got the cpu active in the render settings, try another render to compare with and without the cpu - you might find you can speed up the render time a little bit more on top of the big boost your new card is giving. Certainly, on the old pc I started using Daz on, the ancient Phenom II X4 slowed the render down vs card alone.
I had tried rendering with just the GPU but it just couldn't cope so I was forced to add the cpu to it as well. Now though with this card I am only using gpu and it is really zippy in comparison. I'm hoping to upgrade my mb/cpu/ram at some point later this year but have a lot of other stuff IRL that needs doing first. I've looked at a few different combinations and want to stick with AMD as that is what I'm failiar with but after so many years away from all that the choices out there are a bit bewildering now lol.
I'm glad you are happy with the 1060!
Right now is a very wild time for the PC market. Things are moving pretty fast, and new hardware is coming along from all the vendors. While new hardware is always just around the corner, we are seeing real jumps in performance over past generations. The next AMD Ryzen line up is looking really promising, and it is due sometime this year. Even the budget options would offer huge upgrades over your current machine. Prices on system RAM are expected to fall as well, which should make new builds cheaper. 16GB kits are very likely to drop below $100 for the first time in a long while, which is very exciting.
However, you don't really need to be too concerned about building a new machine. When it comes to Iray, the GPU is the main factor, period. No other part matters as much. Building a new PC will only offer some benefits in how usable the program is itself, like loading times and how laggy Daz may get with a few figures in the scene. A new PC will not help you render much faster at all. If you do get a nice CPU, using CPU+GPU might see a boost in rendering, but not a dramatic one. The only way to see a real upgrade in rendering speed is with a better GPU. So if you are happy with your PC's overall performance now with the 1060, then you may be all set for a good while. You don't need to worry that you are missing out on much.
Yes, that's about the kind of comparison you can expect between the old GTX 630 to the newer GTX 1060. In raw brute force performance, the newer card has over twelve times the processing power, but that figure ignores the many ways in which the hardware has been improved to streamline many processes - that is to say, not only can it do the calculations faster, it also now has to do fewer calculations.
Graphics card performance is something that advances very fast (much faster than CPU performance), and even more so when comparing to a card considerably further up its respective series.