How much vram does your gpu use for making, rigging and animating photorealistic characters for triple AAA-style games?
And how’s performance while sculpting or retopology or using Character Creator by Reallusion or whatever? Is it smooth? A bit laggy but usable? Or not practical to use?
Also, what brand and model gpu do you use? Eg msi 4070 TI super ventus eagle or 2x twin gaming Edition ?
How long have you used it for?
And if u had to, was customer support/rma smooth or unreasonable?
I’m still not sure whether I should break the bank and buy a 4070 TI super, with 16GB vram, or if that’s overspending.
Characters will be my main focus but photorealistic scenery or special effects or clothes is also a possibility. Whatever (good) triple AAA games have, like Elden Ring or Balders Gate 3, or, I’m assuming Tekken 8 is a good game, too?
For a single character you won’t need too much VRAM, they usually have just a few UDIM’s and simple cloth effects. Remember that games are totally optimized for high FPS gameplay. GameArtist website has a lot of content and examples about AAA game assets. Topology and textures in development are not the same as in-game.
You will need a lot of VRAM, disk space and speed to create environments. In studios they usually use non gammer GPU’s with 24+ VRAM, studio drivers. Test your currently hardware with this sample scene:
At the end of the day, the real different isn’t modelling, rigging or animating, etc. Since for much of that (given a somewhat reasonable GPU) it is either more likely to be CPU limited or while animating you use light weight (proxy) setups so that you can preview at 24-30fps in the viewport.
That in turn means largely no textures, no subdivision modifiers or heavy meshes or geometry node groups being active, etc.
All that changes when you then come to render anything, especially Cycles and even to a fair extent Eevee. This can not just be still images but also baking and possible future GPU accelerated systems.
Then of course you need to consider how long you are going to keep using it. I mean some people get a 4090, knowing full well that they will very likely get a 5090 once released.
That’s very different from expecting to use the same hardware for the next 5-6 years and likely software developments and quality expectations over that time.
If planning for game development and intending to use something like Unreal Engine (for the next 5 years) then anything less than the fastest GPU with as much VRAM as possible that you can afford I think would be a mistake.
I mean just look at UE over the past 5 years and ask how you think a GPU from 5 years ago with 8GB VRAM would do if you where still trying to use it with the latest version.
Just saying thanks for your reply and the GameArtist link! One of the people there said they use a 2070 Super. Someone else I know in the gaming industry used that gpu and said it could absolutely handle anything he did. (Apparently, his coworkers were using 1070s at the studio he worked at!)
If I had infinite money, I’d buy a 4070 ti super or a 4090, with new case and psu cuz my current setup doesn’t have 35mm clearance for cable bending to avoid melting cables
But I think I’ll just get a 12GB vram 4070, or a 4070 super if I can find one that doesn’t use 12vhpwr cables. Should be fine for now. I’m not gonna focus on environment for now if that need lots more vram.
