Short update on new hardware; TLDR it's great.

If you're on discord, you might have picked up that I upgraded some hardware the other day. Since I know a few of you dabble with Daz3d and the like, so I figured I'd share my experiences.

Nothing earth shattering, and very little great insights, so if you're not really interested in hardware feel free to skip this.

Starting point

With any pc build optimized for Daz3d, the first thing to look at should the video card, and it does narrow things down considerably. For one, only NVidia is supported, so that narrows the field. With any complex renders on Daz3d, running out of Video RAM is always a concern, as good looking textures tend to be high resolution textures, and good looking figures and models can have a great many of those associated with them as skin, hair, and even clothes can have many different textures applied to create various visual effects, and those all have to be loaded up in memory while rendering.

So I decided to go with the graphics card that has the most of it, which is a 4090.

For my use, I don't particularly need extremely high performance. Any 4090 would already be a big step up from my current setup, and even with my old rig rendering speed wasn't a particularly big bottleneck.

So that's why I decided to save a few bucks by not going for a TI. The main reason for this purchase is the VRAM, and I get that with either model. I ended up settling for a MSI GeForce RTX 4090 GAMING X SLIM because it had a nice sale going on at that moment, and reviews mentioned it was quiet, and so far it's lived up to that (making less noise than the GPUs in my old rig when in full swing).

For those interested: my old build GPUs consisted of a twin 2070TI setup, connected together with NVlink so they could pool their VRAM for textures, and squeeze that much more textures in before I need to look into optimizing. For rendering speed, that setup sufficed for my purposes, even if higher performance is obviously always great.

Other build considerations.

Since my old rig falls just short of the minimum requirements for CPU to upgrade to Windows 11, I decided to put an entire new rig together.

It's not that I like Windows 11 particularly (and some parts of it, I really dislike compared to Windows 10), but I do feel it's important to be on a supported OS in the foreseeable future.

Getting a second rig also means I can slowly migrate my tooling over to the new rig and test things out while not losing the ability to produce while I'm doing so, as I really hate the thought of any down time.

Since my main focus is on the GPU (which ended up being about two thirds of the cost of the entire rig), I decided not to go with bleeding edge when it comes to CPU and mother board, but stayed decidedly middle of the road there.

I did put in a healthy 64 GB RAM and a total of 3 TB in SSD M.2 storage, which is blindingly fast when booting up compared to my old SATA SSDs. A generous helping of storage is useful because the digital assets and the repos for the game take up quite a bit of space now, and I don't want to be swapping stuff from fast to slow storage all the time.

I'd like to mention I'm a big BeQuiet! CPU fan, er... fan. Those are great hulking contraptions (which I only found out after buying one by accident the first time), but they do live up to their name, so I got one for this build again.

Performance.

As was to be expected, rendering performance on even a single 4090 is a great improvement over my twin 2070TI setup. Comparing some complex renders side by side, the 4090 renders those about three to four times faster than they would on the old rig sporting double GPUs.

I'm happy to see the quality of the renders is exactly the same though, which might sound like a weird thing to say, if you were expecting them to be better somehow. But I don't want there to be a different 'feel' to renders on this new system, as that would make any additions or fixes to existing series "stand out" from the rest. So it was important that renders made on each system are indistinguishable, and they are. Even if it was sort of to be expected, it's still a relief to see driver or hardware differences had no effect there.

What I wasn't expecting is that temperature is also way down when it's rendering, especially after some news reports way back about 4090s melting their power cables and the like. I was expecting it to run hot, but the temperature is around 64 Celsius (~150 F), whereas my twin 2070s will run in the higher 70s Celsius (~170 F) when chugging away (keeping my calves nice and toasty in the winter, and just touching on unpleasantly warm in the summer).

I'm guessing that milder temperature also translates to improved power consumption, which like I said, I didn't expect from original news reports.

Conclusions

There are no surprises really. I'm really happy with this new acquisition, and having two rigs at my disposal offers greater flexibility for planning my workload efficiently.