Do you REALLY need a good GPU for Blender?
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 4 มิ.ย. 2024
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Video proof-watched by Cartesian Caramel and Just 3D Things.
00:00 - The Topic
00:28 - (Sponsor) QOL Tools - Rico
00:49 - The Tweet
01:19 - Filling Rendering Power
04:04 - Not Every Value is Equal
04:38 - GPU Acceleration
04:48 - Why I Limit Myself
05:49 - Balance the Components
07:56 - Outsourcing Additional Performance
08:28 - The Important Notes
09:24 - Power != Speed
10:38 - A Different Angle
11:03 - Quality of Life Tools (Sponsor)
12:54 - Closing Thoughts
#blender
❤ Community Sponsor: Rico Holmes (Quality of Life Tools)
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Great Video! Thanks for putting this all into such a concise message. Sharing a bit of my own journey here from potato PC to my new RTX card :)
For anyone struggling because they aren't able to afford high end PC components. You can still make great renders if you lean into render friendly style. Even if that's not your preference. When I first started I was on a very low end PC and did a lot of NPR rendering, because I couldn't do the realistic Cycles renders I wanted. Eventually those simple renderings led to better opportunities and better equipment and I was able to transition into the style I have now. There is absolutely no denying that better PCs make 3D easier, but don't let the lack of a new RTX card prevent you from pursuing 3D as a medium.
My school art program wasn't funded very well and we didn't have the best tools available. My teacher told us that by learning to create good artwork without the better supplies would force us to get better at the fundamentals and we'd excel when we were able to afford better supplies. I feel this applies here as well. Get good at colors, composition, motion, and more. Eventually you'll gain access to better tools and have a strong foundation to take advantage.
Excellent point. I always remind myself that the midrange machine I have now would have been beyond the top of the range not many years ago, and people were doing awesome work then
I bought a new computer about 6 months ago just for Blender. I was on a budget so I decided to go with no GPU at all and use the iGPU and got the best CPU, RAM and SDD that I could for my budget, I thought if I got a gpu back then I would have got a low end one and downgraded the other components. And as someone who works on AR, VR low poly animations plus some geometry nodes I can tell you 6 months later that it was the best decision I could have made, very rarely did I feel the need for a faster gpu for my work, and now I have generated enough from it to buy a high end gpu to add to my setup if I want to
And you can work on far larger scenes than what fits into VRAM this way
@@locinolacolino1302 Isn't there a way for GPU's to directly access your SSD now, so VRAM shouldn't be a stumbling block?
which cpu you buy ???
Absolutely YES! My RTX 4090 OC has put the render-time down to 50-45 % of the previous values of my former RTX 3070ti ! ! If you use optiX in all parameters possible, not only in the "System"-setup, Cycles and Eevee can come to almost the same render-time for the identical scene! For the opposite: If I turn off my Threadripper 3970X (32 Cores), the rendering-time doesn't change more than 1 % maximum! With my other 3D-Software (Lightwave 3D), it is twisted world: Changing the GPU brought abolutely NOTHING in speedup for the rendering-time! But changing to a 64-core Threadripper, would have a great effect, because Lightwave is still CPU-rendering-only.
I dont think so. Only if you do animations. Otherwise you are ok with cpu rendering or renderfarm.
I worked professionally with only 2Gb vram
Well, most people use Blender for animations, I think. For 2D-stils, most people use drawing-software. Of course you can do stills with Blender, too, but that is not the majority. Even at video-games, many loading-screen-graphics or title-pages look drawn, not rendered to me. Only the trailers, intros or cut-scenes inside the game are rendered animations. But you can create nice atmosphere and effects for stills, too, of course. I would like to see some of your art, to have a better idea, of what you are creating. :o) @hugotunesartwithblender
🗜️ As a casual user with a M2 MacBook Air and a M1 iMac, limitations are a lifestyle for my blender experience 😂 however I’ve been quite impressed with what I can actually get done, and have always found that when things start to chug it’s more likely an understanding issue on my part, and not my setup.
I’d absolutely love to see a video about render farm workflow, or techniques to isolate GPU-heavy tasks in different contexts.
In 2023 I had some free time to work on blender projects, only the computers did not have any GPU. 9th gen cpus and modest ram. The process was liberating. It forced me to only focus on modeling, and modeling as light a mesh as I could. I was able to make much more progress on my projects in a shorter amount of time. I then polished and did all the heavy lifting at home.
I suffer with a lack of pipleline focus and tend to bounce from task to task within a project and end up making little noticeable progress. This kills my motivation to finish the project at all.
Long story longer; Blender is still light enough to run on a weak machine. A super powerful GPU is not necessary.
I started using blender on a regular laptop with no graphics card. But as I progressed I realised that the hardware was sometimes completely incapable of executing my vision no matter the cutbacks or optimisation used. That's why I stopped making renders cause its very disheartening when you cannot make an epic scene on your potato laptop while the neighbour's kid is using his 3090 to write his assignment on MS word.
i learned blender on a 1660ti mobile gpu with 6gb of vram, it was a bit rough but manageable. I upgraded to a 3090 when I could afford to. The higher end GPU definitely let me experiment with different techniques, but watching the mem usage on my gpu I think most of the times I could get away with something in the 12GB Vram range. 4080, 4070 or even the 4060ti with 16gb would probably be more than enough for rendering still images. I think if I was on a super tight budget and didn't want many limitations the 4060ti with 16gb of vram would be the way to go. The only drawback to that card is the memory bus, it'll take longer to build bvh and load the scene into vram. The advantages of Optix in nvidia cards (even the slower ones) is so high you just have to avoid out of core rendering or cpu bound rendering and you're good to go unless you're trying to render long animations.🛠
Great video! I'm getting ready to get my next computer and this is a big help in deciding what components to add to it to get the best of all worlds with a budget! 🔧
I largely agree and balancing your PC is always important. Thought as Others have pointed out in the comments there are certain thresholds that allow you to experiment with techniques that you just couldn't before. 🔧
Thanks you so much! Super helpful 🛠️
🛠 Great advice and thanks for sharing the QoL tools. 🔧
Wonderful insights on the topic. I really enjoyed this one 🛠️
Ooh, that Distances thing is a must (and, as you say, why is that not in Blender's main suite?). BTW Curtis, do you have any experience with Turbo Tools? Seems like a good rendertime-shrink for Cycles🛠
Thank you Curtis. This is very helpful, top notch content, as always!
I do a lot of large scale models for EV charging stations site development. I bought the QOL full collection and it is just genius, a lot of stuff I have been looking for to speed up my workflow. Thank you Curtis for the recommendation.
Rendering performance is great and all, but where I look for the best performance is the rendered viewport, the faster this updates, the quicker I can see what affect my changes are making. Reduction of final render times is just a cherry on top. Currently have a Quadro RTX 4000 mobile gpu.
Thanks for bringing this up. I deal with very large number of assets and collections on my models. I have a Dell Alienware with 32GB RAM and a RTX 3070 mobile with 8GB VRAM. I have no problem with rendering times. What I really struggle is a lagging viewport which forces me to constantly disable collection views
🧰 working in a studio environment that has just started doing a 3d pipeline has been "fun", in figuring out how to get the most out of machines that were not built for it. like we have some artists working on laptops with 1070s, so it's been interesting trying to make sure they have run the sets we have as you can't brute force the problem.
Very true actually. I've being saying it for many years now - in many cases limited hardware doesn't limit you, it forces you to grow as a professional, especially if you are just in the beginning of your journey.
Very interesting. Thank you. ⚒🔨🔧🛠 I’ve used an nvidia 1650 4gb, looking back I’m amazed what I created, I remember having to close the viewport just so I could render out an endless engines competition submission. I’ve now upgraded to an Rtx 3060 12gb. It’s so fast now (comparatively speaking of course). Pc spec: I5 cpu and 16gb ram on an old dell motherboard it has served me well and fingers crossed will keep doing so until the forecasted price drop of pc components due later this year. 😳 mmm we wish.
⚙ Interesting, i will be reconsidering which card to buy for my next machine, which i am planing to use mostly to work on Blender and 3D stuff in general.
I'm running an i7-2600, 16 GB PC I've had used since 2013. The only thing that makes it work is the RTX 3060 12 GB I upgraded to last year. I'm amazed how much better it is, I can do all sorts of things with a good GPU. Sure baking takes forever and you have to be smart with simulations but I'm animating a music video for a client right now and it's handling things I never would have dreamed it could.
🛠Thanks Curtis. This is helpfull. QOL Tools are great.
VRAM was the problem on my 2060. Adjustments and optimization helped but high res and big scene rendering was a problem. Upgraded recently and it makes a huge difference. 🛠️🔧
The one thing that I would say different from your tip on, "just make a gaming pc," is that I have found that lots of ram is just the best thing ever for production. So I'd say, make a gaming pc and fill it with as much ram as you can and drop the generation down a peg or two if it helps you get a lot more ram.
I'm using M1 Pro since Blender 3.0.0 and its Blender benchmark score is around 400 (RTX4090 is 11000 btw) and it handled all my use cases and I use Blender minimum 5 hours a day. I create stock images & models, generate hundreds of 3d models for my employee, generate scripts and workflows that utilize Blender CLI for studios, etc. All my use cases is possible with an entry level Macbook Pro despite I can get a much beefier GPU with the same price on a Windows system.
it’s crazy because now that base m3 is even faster at ~800 😅
@@chidorirasenganz how many in M3MAX-40 core? I heard it's still slower than 4060 Mobile
@@thanatosor ~3500 which is around 3070-3080 performance
@@chidorirasenganz Great, exactly equal to my 4060M
Interesting food for thought. I have a 5yo laptop with an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060. It works, for an old-ish laptop I’m sure it could be a lot worse, but I have no chance of rendering animations locally, and I want that. I have a £2000-3000 budget for a desktop so I know I *could* go pretty top end on both CPU and GPU. God knows what I actually “need” though, making that decision has me just delaying upgrading at all when I could’ve bought something so much nicer to play with by now
🔨 I 100% agree with you. I learned 3D CAD about 20 years ago and got back on to it in the last year. I got my GF daughter ( 10 year old ) in to blender using my old desktop, CPU rendering only. She is loving it. I got a cheap desktop and dropped a GTX 1650 in it that I use in my free time. I could get a 4090 but its overkill.
Been working on a large project, and VRAM really became an issue. Its faster to render with CPU than the tiny tiles it required to render with GPU, since I only have 12GB of VRAM.
Feels like im more constrained on gpu Vram more then anyhting, rendering in 4k with 4k textures in a medium scene 8gb vram is not enough for my 3070.
However for smaller 4k projects, I optimized it where its pretty good.
🛠I actually spend about 6 years using a mid -end computer (2 VRAM + 4 RAM), and ended up designing my workflow around what can I do without making my computer lag, and always rendering from command line to avoid crashes. Now I have a new laptop and everything just feels blazing fast.
What do you think of the new m3 MacBook for blender?
🔧 As a complete beginer in Blender I found your video very enlightening. I am at the moment thinking of buying a new pc because my Windows 7, Intel i5 2500k, 16gb ram and the old Geforce 430 just takes way too long to render anything, even a simple image can take 15 mins lol. On the upside, I have no problems actually using blender with this PC so far but like I said, it's only very simple stuff. I need to upgrade to Win 11 to be able to get the latest Blender 4, so that will mean getting a new pc. The info you gave on cpu vs gpu was really helpful, thank you. If you have any other tips on what kind of pc I should be looking for, please feel to let me know. P.S. I did build that pc but that was over 10 years ago.
Well, i have an i7-13700k and 4070 gpu, and everysingle time i use both, it literally cuts rendering time by half compared to just using gpu, idk know why, but they both are running when rendering (regardless of tile size, though for me, 1024 by 1024 tile is the fastest).
Sidenote: i have a 3060 not installed, and my motherboard can hold up to 3 gpus. I have a 850 watt gold modular power supply, is it worth adding on the 3060? Will it speed up rending?
are you happy with 4070? im about to get one, but dont know if its an overkill for my skils :D
Even tho I’m a Blender user of over a dozen years, I must admit I haven’t gotten around to wrapping my head around hardware, and the intersection between hardware and software. I’m honestly not fully conscious of the difference between the CPU and the GPU; I just need to make art.🤣 Thus that is one area I need to get more familiar with, and I’d love to be informed about the quilt as you said of what hardware factors would be more suited for different niches of Blender use. This vide mostly talked about rendering which is important. So also what about physics simulations or Geo Nodes simulation. I assume that’s a RAM thing, but is it also a GPU thing. Or for animating, compositing, or those who sculpt, et cetera et cetera.
Btw I’ve been a viewer of yours for awhile but I’m kinda quiet but I always watch your videos to the end.😆 Always love the content and hope you are well🔧
If I knew you I would bear hug you right now. This is extremely informative and helpful sir! Thank you for real❤
⚒ Closest thing I could find to a tool emoji! Great video! Thank you.
I personally have been using blender on an old intel integrated gpu, for 10 years now. Ofc, that has forced me to focus more on modelling, game assets, grease pencil and low poly rendering, but i never felt like I was held back. Of course if you want to render complex scenes, animations, physics etc, a good gpu is a must. But there is still a ton you can get out if blender without a GPU.
I can't install blender 4.0 on my Intel HD :( and it means I couldn't participate in the kaizen contest because I couldn't open the scene with blender 2.8
@@icephoenix174 Yes, 10 year older gpus are have just been dropped support on blender 4.0, although blender 3.6 still works. Have you tried that.
which is also why i am looking to finally get a proper gpu now (6700xt)
@@askeladden450 I'll give it a shot. It's a 3rd gen Pentium so I'm pushing it 😂 I had to learn Linux to get it to run even remotely well. I'll look for 3.6
Edit: also thanks :)
Sage advice Curtis. My two additional thoughts:
If you look back to the CG effects and animation that was done in the 90's, the artists were constrained by not only power, but by software maturity. Yet, there are still amazing examples of artistry on show. Power does not equal better art.
Many underpowered machines used together can often give you the speedy render results you require. I have saved many jobs in the past by roping in my kids and wife's laptops to meet a deadline.
🛠️
I don't need as much power as most of you since I am using it to make printable 3D (so don't need in-depth renders for example) models but I got lucky I think. I went from a 1060 to a 3080 right when the 4000 series came out. The whole new PC (minus more RAM) was less than a 3080 alone a few months prior. Although I am disappointed my top two USBs don't work, but oh well.
Great video. Worth considering if you are making music, also, for example.
Only if you do animations in my opinion. Otherwise you are ok with cpu rendering or renderfarm.
I worked professionally with only 2Gb vram
Thnx🔨🔧
I have yet to see a scene that I can't render with my RTX 3060 12G, most of the Blender demos render under 2 minutes at 512 samples with it, I just might get a RTX 4070 Super 12GB and use it with my RTX 3060, and hopefully triple my speed for cheap, that is assuming that Cycles scales well, It's kinda hard to find info on that subject!
Writing this before watching. Just want to mention that memory is a thing. It is a literall 1:1 Measure of how much you can put in a scene until you have to just throw the gpu away and use your ram and cpu. So yes, but no… but yes.
After viewing: my point stands. If you want to make environments, which is basically everyone, there is a minimum vram you need. If you don’t have that minimum (which depends but is usually above 3gb) you might as Well run on internal graphics and buy a beefy cpu. Aka there is a sweetspot. I did all my client work on my 2019 MacBook.. it got fried. Invest Well. Oh and if ur a gamer, you’re usually good.
As someone with a notebook series gpu which is Nvidia 920m . I agree with this video
Is CPU: Ryzen 5 7600X and GPU: 4060 TI 16GB a nice combo for a starter on blender? I want to build a pc that could handle Blender and explore into 3D world a bit! I will appreciate if someone answers!
This is actually a video where I was actually curious about the sponsor. 🛠️
⚒🔨🔧...A very helpful video, keep it up..
Agreed. I learned Blender on a 6G 2060. I was forced to learn a lot about optimization before I could afford to upgrade to a 3090 and I still use the knowledge I learned while bouncing off the VRAM ceiling of the 2060.
Hold my 1060 and i7 7600
@@Dmitry2184 Ditto, except my processor was lower lol. It worked, but only barely.
For me what I don't like is all the Blender benchmarks and videos are all about rendering. I spend most of my time modeling and would have loved to understand that the gpu is only going to help so much in the 3d viewport, from what I understand it has a lot more to do with the cpu and it's single core speed or power. but I would love to see a video to help understand what computer parts effect which aspects of blender, especially before my next build. I dought I even need my 3080 12gb since I use blender for 3d printing and designing stuff to print, so almost never render. it does help but not as much as I thought it would.
That's why the BI is targeting Vulkan for the interface, assuming that they do it properly, which remains to be seen, I am not convinced that they will do it at all, it just might be more hype, but if they do it, then it should, hopefully, significantly speed up the interface!
@@gcharb2d Thanks,I didn't know about that, I look into it
🧰 I have been on Blender with my RTX 2060 for more than 2 years…
I was going for the 4090…. No I am rethinking it😓
I mostly do modelling/texturing and animations…
2080 Ti🤔
I will get the QOL pack!
The measurement addon alone looks great!
Talking from GameDev perspective, it's always about optimization, or doing more with less, so lowest PC specs to get the job done is our goal.
I have a GeForce GTX 1660. It's fine for the most part, but with models with a lot of vertices, edges, faces, triangles, etc, it is LAGGY. And with renders, cycles in particular, it can take quite a while to render 10 frames. I'm hoping that I can reduce the lag and render time without having to invest in a higher-end GPU.
4090 top GPU, not only is it twice as powerful as the 3090, but it is also very cold and quiet. If you need to render complex animations with a bunch of details, I would recommend only this GPU
The easy answer is that you only need a top end GPU if you already have a top end CPU.
Even on the highest end gaming Intel CPU you can buy, a regular cycles render will never use more than about 50% of my RTX4090. (You’ll probably get a lot more GPU utilization with a workstation CPU though)
In most cases, the CPU will bottleneck long before the GPU will.
I needed to hear this, though I'm currently working with a RTX1660ti, it's a bit brutal. 🔨🔧🛠️
I love what you said here👍. With this now, can someone continue to use blender without any kind of GPU and still be ok using only the CPU power? 🛠🔧
I do more animation oriented work, which requires rendering thousands of frames. I'm planning on upgrading to a 4070 in particular due to a nice boost of rendering speed compared to my 2070, while also not drawing as much power which is good for saving money on electricity bills. Frankly, I've noticed recently that I keep running out of memory so the extra boost of vram will be handy too.
I woukd go for the 4070Ti SUPER (16 Gb) was it I think. I sometimes hit the limit with the 12 Gb VRAM of my 4070Ti, but probably running to many apps at the same time. Price difference is minimal.
That's exactly the reason, why I switched to the RTX 4090 OC! I am only a hobbyist, making no money from my 3D-work, but I was really fed-up of letting my PC run for 6-8 hours over night, or waiting 2 hours, just for a 10-seconds video. Now it is less than 1 hour, for more complex-scenes and if I keep it simple, I was able to do 2700 frames in only 56 minutes with Eevee!
@@mifyitaad I really want to go for the Ti or Super variant, but I'll see how the prices will come out. In Europe, GPU prices have been terrible for years now.
I build my newest PC april last year with the RTX 4070Ti and went for a better CPU and more RAM instead of taking a more expensive Nvidia card. Thanks for making me feel better about my choice. 🛠
Bought 3800x 2 years ago on good mobo and with 16gb of fast ram, unfortunately got myself rx580 later, which is great GPU for the price, but is not supported by blender. Here i am checking the options from cheap 1660 to 4070. I think i will get 4070 as its relatively cheap for its performerance.
Such a sensible and logical observation. Love your brain dude.
I was hoping for a bit of comparison and analysis between one card vs another in Blender, and certainly with one GPU brand vs another. But that would require buying multiple cards so I don't hold it against you.
It would've been invaluable information though. Radeon cards are faster at a lower price at everything I use except Blender. I don't know how much I'm willing to make that sacrifice or what the sacrifice even is without actually seeing the numbers. I've been looking for this info for years, and it's especially relevant these days as the companies have gotten increasingly unwilling to make good, affordable cards on the lower end.
first you need to try turbo render and then consider whether to replace the GPU...
Upgrading to 8 GB Gpu did help though, a lot
I have made so many rookie mistakes with Blender that I realise I am the ultimate "Blender Tool"...!!!🔧🔧🔧 Great information. Thanks Curtis!
Animators for sure don't need powerful GPU. All of the deformers that are used run on CPU. Noone is using Cycles with its RT in the viewport to animate things around, it's still faster with Eevee and even then you don't enable all eye candy of the final/semi final renderer while animating.
Simulations run on CPU and eat RAM for breakfast.
Modelers need to make not too high poly models anyway and they don't require RT, raster all the way.
You can even get away with Eevee renderer most of the time as a single person for animations. And if you're just doing stills it won't matter much whether it's taking 5 or 20 minutes when you just need 1-10 pictures per project.
I'd say grab the most decent CPU that you can and if know you're doing sims then as much RAM as you can get(timings and speed in memory benchmarks mean nothing), SATA SSD is more then enough(there is little to no speed increases for random read/writes on NVME only sequential that's used in video editing). Then go for monitor and the mouse, and only afterwards for GPU, MB, PSU, keyboard and the case. I think this is the best way of thinking about building cheap 3d workstation. And if you have money to throw around you wouldn't need any advice anyway.
This video has saved me a lot of money!❤
GPU doesn't greatly affect my blender usage, as most of my assets go into game engines, as opposed to natively rendering in Blender. Different jobs/workloads, different needs. 😀
🔧 cool video!
🔧 🔨 Beginners give you an answer, but experts almost always say "it depends".
But also I would still call 2080ti very high end GPU😅
Short answer: Only if want to render faster. It seems to me that a render farm would be a better solution for big renders.
🔧Nice...
Is that an Oura ring you're wearing?
There is point of diminished return on higher end GPU upto 4090 that it become not worthy anymore.
🛠
TOOOOOL emoji. Quality of life stuff should just be in blender natively, agree!
QoL 🔨
Will my AMD RX 6800 be up to the task for Blender?
@@vjfxtheory is there alternative software out there for AMD users to use rendering software natively?
🔧🛠 Great points and a great video!
Thanks Curtis
Thanks Victor!
And haha, this is the first time I'm seeing one of our Member emotes in use. Gives me a good laugh 😄
🛠️
No, used to use blender on a 2013 MacBook fine 😂
🛠🛠
🛠🔧
Tool🔧
⚒
🔧
🔨
🔧Yes, Sheep-it is still going strong! Kind of an amazing service, really, and a fabulous way to get projects with a *lot* of frames rendered in a reasonable amount of time.
🔧🛠️⚒️🎉
tool emoji :D
this was pretty cool and informative, I'll keep it in mind when I build my next PC 🪛
I just sold my car for three video cards
😮
I have gtx 710 (i render in cou)😂
wait Rtx 5090
Some really important points in this vid - especially the stuff relating to overloading system resources with detail that won't be visible. The main issue that forced me to upgrade my GPU was VRAM, but again, optimisation of scenes can help with that too!🪛
🥰
Bizzare argumentation - you're being paid for completed work but you spend your time fussing over workaround optimisation. Why not run a 286 then you can be really efficient 😂
F in the chat for AMD GPUs, not even a shoutout in the discussion….lol