If you had no budget what woul…
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If you had no budget what would your wish machine be?

in The Commons
Falcon agreed to refund the 10K machine we bought back in Jan 2017,the one they replaced in March 2017, fixed it in June 2017 and 2018 and 2019 etc. etc. I have a dual 1080ti with 64K ram and two ssd 2tb internal drives etc, but it doesn't render like the Falcon (dual titan pascal xs) did. What specs would you pick for fast high res, print press ready, 3d multi-persons (8 or more characters) in large environment renders, animated, that would not bring a system to its knees, not even make a system bow its head?
Comments
...this:
Kidding aside, I would be looking for a workstation setup with at 128 GB of memory, dual liquid cooled Xeon E5-2699P v4 CPUs (88 total threads [I also work in Carrara and 3DL], Turbo 3.6GHz, W7 Pro compatible) a Dual 48 GB Quadro RTX 8000s with NVLink (total 96 GB VRAM), Single 1 TB SSD Boot, dual 2 TB library SSDs with an 8 GB HDD external backup, Dual 27" displays Ergonomic engineering trackball control and a full tower enclosure.
Not many folk use that term "No Budget" as in, money isn't particularly an object; just get things done. I just retired from the film biz & heard that once a Stallone flik.
Anyway, just cut to the chase:
World’s Fastest Custom Workstations | BOXX
...yeah pretty nice, but for my needs, a single i9 instead of dual Xeons is a downside (again, for Carrara and 3DL the more threads the merrier). If I only worked in Iray, and went with the 8 core i7 as well as using the rest of the setup I outlined above, then I would say yes.
I have a dual 1080ti with 64K ram
May I suggest getting 64gb of ram will speed up your machine. 64k might be a bit light for rendering any scenes as that is the same as a Commordore 64 (sorry I could not resist) :)
David
...yes, but this would either be running on Windows Server or Linux, the latter which is not supported by Daz while the former does not run desktop programmes very efficiently. You also better have an unlimited budget for the upgrades to your home's electrics and your monthly power bill (or a Mr. Fusion).
Iray Server runs on Linux.. so it would be fine to render on.
...however the Daz software doesn't (well not without pulling a lot of hair out trying to get Studio to run smoothly under Wine), so you'd need other arrangement for setting up your scenes before sending them to the server.
10KW is an awful big power draw that wouldn't be supported by average residential electrics (at least here in the states, and if you are a flat dweller, you are out of luck as management generally frowns on making such modifications to a unit)..
For an Iray rig?
An Epyc processor, 64-128 gigs of ram, and 2 RTX Titans... or alternitively, 4 Titan XPs
Literally no budget?
Assuming my primary goal was Iray rendering and I didn't want a rack I'd go with dual RTX quadro 8000 in a TR rig. TR wouldn't be for lots of cores/threads but for the massive number of PCIE lanes although having a lot of CPU could be handy in other applications. I'd want the most RAM the system could fit, 128 Gb for TR.
Storage would be tricky assuming this is a standalone machine, it would be simpler with a NAS or some of other sort of file server avalable locally. I'd probably go for m.2 NVME drives in RAID 10 for the OS and applications and enterprise grade HDD's in RAID 5 for working files and 3d assets, probably 6 WD Ultrastar's at 12 Gb each.
You'd need a mammoth case for this and that means ful tower with eATX support. There are only a handful of such on the market and they all cost $400+.
Some quick back of the envelope calculations says that could blow past $20k. But it's you could have a better desktop system for Iray rendering.
I followed a link from a Scan email when they were plugging Titan RTX cards - the top end machine in the linked section, which I think had quad Quadros, was £51,xxx (and 97p). I wislisted one.
Honestly if I literally had an "unlimited budget" for 3D/CG, I would most certainly
would not be using consumer toys like Daz studio that cannot even
open more than one DS scene file at a time
In fact I would pursue my true passion and become a film director and use my
unlimited budget to just Pay
the Framestore,Industrial Light &Magic,Blur Studios etc to visualize My Creative objectives.
If no budget also includes electrical bill, then I would try to make a render farm. If no budget includes software, I would get The full version of all the software I want, including Maya, marvelous Designer, cinema 4D and other stuff. If it includes getting tutors, I would hire a few. I would try to get a way to get my favorite art teacher to teach me more of traditional art. Mum (the favorite art teacher) would probably wonder where I get the funds and be worried about it.
Oh for computers, not sure, but first I would finish building my computer. Get the best nvidia GPU that will work with my motherboard. To be honest I would rather continue with building my current attempt at a desktop and get a house than to get the best computer ever.
Miss Bad Wolf is on the right track here.
And if money really were "no object", that would mean that I was financially independent. So of course I'd retire from my job so that I could actually have the time to work out, do art, music, horticulture, and food preparation all day, every day.
Agreed
Well seeing as DDR5 and USB4 are due out soon, anything you bought now would be obsolete almost as soon as it was set up. Desktop and Laptop development has almost languished the last 5+ years due to the focus on the mobile market. These, along with NVMe and RTX are finally breaking that stagnation but it will take some time for those changes to percolate through the industry. Personally, I wouldn't invest too heavily in any desktop until these changes stabalize and become the norm (as a group.) Besides the hardware becoming more stable, the software and related hardware has to catch up to actually take advantage of it all. Soon after that, the prices should drop to a not cheep but somewhat reasonable price rather then paying a high price to beta test it all.
Almost forgot, about that time I would be looking to build something on this system board's successor probably Asus 99-E WS.
About that time, Micro LED might be available as a main monitor.
...however Epyc means running Linux which is not compatible with any Daz software (or for that fact even many of the expensive pro programmes save for Maya).
I am somewhat surprised they allow the RTX Titans to stack VRAM through NVLink. This would undercut paring their Quadro 6000 by more than half the total cost about 5,000USD vs. just over 10,000USD). I remember in the days of the Titan X and original Quadro 6000, both had nearly the same specs and the same amount of VRAM (12 GB) though the Titan X was about one fifth the price. Some pro studios were opting for the lower cost Titans instead of Quadros as there was little difference between the two to justify the high markup.
I'm happy to paypal you the 97p, just so you'll post the render results in the threads.
I've had three instances of Studio running at once; where you're probably going wrong is using Daz and not Studio.
All joking aside, I've no idea why you can't have more than one.
Edit: just tried four instances and one of them rendering on a 980ti; i use a 970 to drive 3 monitors.
Yes I have open more than one instance of DS but you are limited in sharing Data between them without
Saving to the content library and reloading in the other instance of DS
which frankly sucks.
With Maxon C4D I can have ONE instance of C4D running and open multiple previously
created scenes and Literally copy and past scene assets with materials& animation data between them.
This makes for a very convenient animated filmaking workflow
when one needs to harvest a particular element or entire environments from an old scene
file containing hundred of objects in nested hierarchies such as a motion graphic
element that already has automatic animation running infinitely driven
by the C4D motion graphics system
There are also times when I want to create and edit a processor
intenstive element like Dynamic hair or a heavy particle simulation.
in such cases I can just hit command+new and "step outside"
to an empty,unfettered scene and paste in my Character/element and work on the
simulation and paste it back into the main scene in its exact,previous location.
DDR5 is not imminent. The spec has been finalized but none of the RAM manufacturers have made any sticks yet and neither AMD nor Intel have said their next generation CPU's, Ryzen 3000 and Intel "10th generation core," will support it. I'd guess you won't see it on desktop PC's until 2021 or 2022.
USB 4 isn't going to make a huge difference since the cables and connectors are even more expensive than USB 3, which is why adoption has been relatively slow.
What is coming soon, with at least the high end Ryzen 3000's, is PCIE 4 which will doble the bandwidth of each PCIE lane. That could make rendering on multiple GPU's available on much more modest systems.
Also if you hold back on building/buying a PC because some new tech is on the horizon you'll never pull the trigger. There's always something new coming. Optane RAM is due soon and it could be a massive game changer but the currently announced sticks are far too expensive for most people, I build systems for a data center and even we are taking a wait and see on it.
Thanks guys,
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/titan/titan-rtx/ looks really impressive so I called Nvidea and apparently it is their best card. The very helpful guy had a heavy accent so I missed 50% of what he said but the one thing that came thru loud and clear was that this card was better suited for servers. He also recommended an NVlink vs SLI bridges for 2080 ti's etc. He also inferred that dual cards share the load and are not used to full capacity but thought two 2080 RTX ti would be better despite sharing loads. (Scratches head). I am heading over to Nvidea forum to check out a couple of other things. then am heading to GPU benchmark.
There are good and bad things about aging, one of them is having a mortgage free house but it took buying flipping and selling multiple houses to become mortgage free. The roof has 26 solar panels for power and eight solar heating panels for the pool, but I tend to wwork offline (prepaid adobe for a year to avoid always being online and just moved it to a different PC because the updates and windows drivers often mismatch) so a farm wouldn't work for me unless I could use it offline.
Got a lot of good info from you and others. Thank you for that. I just wished I coulld have understood more of the phone call I made. Based on comments here, I told my tech to add 3K to his budget and increase the Ram to 128K and Titan RTX is not much more than 2 2080ti's but also checking out Quadros cards.
Thank god for that because I have way to many objectives and prefer to not delegate most of them. I find the joy rests is in the creation, not just the idea. And sadly most ideas have to remain unshared until they manifest into shareable assets.
Easy then, just build a machine for creating scenes and send them to the DGX to render. Daz has the ability to bridge to servers. If you have unlimited budget, then surely you can build a computer for this task. You can also get the place wired for the power draw.
The 2080ti and 2080 can both pool memory as chaosgroup has already proven. Plus Tom Peterson directly answered this question before Turing even launched. Plus Octane has an official post about it (see below). VRAM pooling is not a myth nor my rampant speculation (though I did predict it.) So certainly the new RTX Titan can do it, too. It doesn't uncut anything, really. You are still talking about a cool +$5 grand for two Titans to achieve this. There is a catch, and that is you only pool two 2080 or 2080ti's with Nvlink. So there is your catch. Here is the post from an Octane update that mentions VRAM pooling:
The final stable release of Octane 2018.1 is out!
Plugins will follow shortly. Now onto Octane 2019 - just in time for #GTC19 and #GDC19 next week!
https://twitter.com/otoy/status/1105337338945658880
2018.1 Feature Overview
-Cryptomatte
-Deep render passes
-Vectron (analytic geometry)
-Vertex Attributes
-Spectron (procedural volumetric light system)
-Much less volume render noise
-NV Link support on RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti (Enterprise only)
-Direct Levelset surface rendering from VDB (can be fed into Vectron)
-Scatter depth limiting (i.e. fast fog rendering)
-Cached compressed textures
Interesting for the RNDR community:
NVLink on consumer GPUs: RTX 2080 Ti and RTX 2080
NVLink gives you the ability to effectively double GPU VRAM by combining two cards into one pool of fast shared (not mirrored) memory. NVLink will currently only work with 2 cards, which either need to be both Quadros, or RTX cards.
SLI mode needs to be enabled for non-Quadro GPUs (TCC mode for Quadros). Ensure you use the bridge over your cards, or you may experience a large performance drop.
Link:
https://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=70809
...only if you own your home. If you are renting/leasing your living space, management generally frowns on such modification.
I viewed the title as referring an "unlimited budget" for just the system itself and nothing else, sort of like some computer company/builder offering you a special "gift card".
I pretty much know understand what my needs are for the work I do, hence my "dream" is little more conservative than others here (save for the duo Quadro 8000s which should pretty well handle most if not all I create, even for gallery quality prints). Do I really need 256 or 512 GB of VRAM? Do I really need 1.5TB of memory. Do I want to become more of an IT manager than a CG artist having to mess around with updating Linux and troubleshooting networking? Not really. I just would like to create nice images in high quality format.
You were badly misinformed, what you should expect from CS anywhere, Titan's of any variety are not server cards. They are intended for the commercial market. Quadro's and Tesla's are meant for the workstation and server market. The Titan RTX has the same GPU as the RTX Quadro 8000 but half the VRAM. I'm pretty sure that makes the RTX Quadro 8000 Nvidia's best graphics card at the moment.
Also you cannot use an SLI bridge on any RTX card. You have to use an NVLink connector.
in Daz 2 graphics cards do "share the load" in that, assuming the scene can load onto both, they render the scene together which decreases render time. Memory pooling may become available in Daz eventually but no one knows if or when besides the devs and they aren't saying.
The OP question should have included "for your needs" because it's not going to matter to me if a render finishes in 3 minutes or 13 minutes as I don't do heavy scenes professionally.
To someone like me as a hobbist who renders scenes that usually take no longer than 30 minutes at the most, the investment in a killer system is just not worth it either time-wise or money-wise.
If my work depended upon fast rendering, or a nurd concerned with bragging rights, then that that's another thing altogether, but 90% of us are hobbiests who aren't about to invest in anything that makes little difference to our work-flow.
And yet, somehow, these people managed to bench a 7000 series EPYC running Windows 10:
https://www.kitguru.net/components/james-morris/gigabyte-mz01-ce0-amd-epyc-workstation-motherboard-review/4/
They bench Cinebench 15 along with a bunch of other programs running on Windows 10.
EPYC being limited to Linux is simply a myth.
Here's Wendell at Level 1 Techs talking about performance differences between Windows and Linux with an EPYC 7551P
And here's a dual 7601 EPYC that is being sold with Windows 10 Pro 64 Bit
https://www.titancomputers.com/Titan-W375-Titan-W375-Dual-AMD-EPYC-7000-Serie-p/w375.htm
And here's the Velocity Micro blog talking about their EPYC workstation. Note the Windows task manager screenshot - and according to the Cinebench screenshot it's running Windows 8 Pro no less, not Windows 10 (that's probably a misread by the Cinebench software). Velocitymicro only offers windows 10 as an option on their website, but it might be interesting to see if they might also install Windows 8, via a personal chat with their support staff or something.....
https://www.velocitymicro.com/blog/hd360a-epyc-workstation/
Lots of options out there on the interwebs r.e. AMD EPYC and Windows 10. And just possibly Windows 8 as well apparently if that Cinebench screenshot is to be believed...
My dreams seem much less expensive than yours!
Here's a 4000$ system: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/3fY8pG
Then, add 4 Titan RTX, an 8K monitor, and nice peripherals, and we get to 18000$: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/QwM2vn