Need more horsepower for Eevee - Do you have experience with Virtual Desktop Services?

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Hey,

I work primarily with stylized NPR look dev in Eevee. I spend all my time in Geo-Nodes and the Shader Editor, pushing the latter to the limit quite often as I work procedurally and frequently exhaust what seems to be Blender’s internal limit for Texture Nodes. The scenes I work on get quite complex, usually millions of polygons and thousands of objects all utilizing these heavy shaders.

In other words - my viewport gets choppy at a certain point, and I need to be able to work fluidly on these big, heavy scenes. Additionally, Geo-Node setups get heavy too, despite my best efforts to optimize.

I don’t really understand computers or what any of these GPU, CPU, Cuda, Optix, Multi-core, Hyper-threaded, AMD, RAM, Overclocking Avada kadabra black magic words mean, but I would love to know what I need to put in my computer in order to speed it up for this exact kind of work.
If you could break it down easy for me that’d be swell :smiley:

What do I have to buy for Eevee to play nice even if I overwork and underpay her?
And what about Geometry Nodes, how can I make it carry more than it wants to?

Current Specs:

11th Gen Intel(R) Core™ i7-11700K @ 3.60GHz 3.60 GHz
64GB Ram
Nivida GeForce RTX 3060

That leads me to the second part of my question:

I travel a lot, so I have been considering a Virtual Desktop Service. If you have any experience with this, from an individual artist standpoint, or any recommendations/warnings, I would love to hear them.

Thanks a lot!

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I am a huge advocate for SplashTop- it’s only five dollars a month and it’s the most stable/gets the best FPS of any I’ve tried: https://www.splashtop.com/

Eevee is a GPU engine- you want as much VRAM as you possibly get for complicated shaders. If you can get your hands on a 3090, that has 4 times as much VRAM as your 3060. The 4090 is the best GPU on the market for Cycles, but given how much VRAM Eevee uses… you’d be hard pressed to do better than a 3090

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To echo this, especially related to Eevee/NPR - it’s worth taking some time to determine if your scene requires more RAM vs RAW SPEED. Obviously the 4000 series cards are faster, but as an example - the scenes I’m working on lately render at about 2-3 seconds per frame on a 3060ti. So, increasing the render speed of the frame wouldn’t drastically improve my life - ie, there’s a point at which you have to ask yourself if it’s worth spending $1600 to save 1 sec/frame of render time.

However, in terms of RAM - completely different equation. If you’re having issues with overall processing, turn on scene stats so that you can see how much memory is being utilized for your renders. If it’s approaching anywhere near max RAM, then that 3090 card is absolutely going to make things happier.

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Actually it has twice as much, the desktop 3060 was a 12GB card.
**** Unless we are talking the much more recently released version of the 3060, as that happens to be a 8GB card, but I’m assuming the OP got their 3060 a year or two ago and all of the original cards are 12GB. It was the 3060 Ti that was and still is a 8GB card.

For anyone wonder, DO NOT buy the 3060 8GB version, it’s nothing more then a money grab by Nvidia to use up 3060 GPU dies, while saving on VRAM.

That aside, I’ve not really used Eevee, so not as up on the impact a higher GPU would have, vs Cycles. Having said that, it wouldn’t surprise if faster/more VRAM does help, I just expect it wouldn’t scale as well compared to Cycles rendering.

Maybe check task manager or use something like GPU-Z to see how much VRAM you are using when working on your usual projects. If it turns out to peak at 100% of the 3060 (and that’s a 12GB model), then a GPU with more VRAM will no doubt help. Which in the case of Nvidia currently means a 3090 or 3090 Ti (ideally get the Ti if possible) or a 4080 which has 16GB or 4090. Everything else has 12GB or less.

As for Geo-Nodes, etc I suspect its the CPU that would be holding things back a little. Again, use Task Manager to see what it is doing as you work on projects. You need to look at all cores and not just the total CPU usage. Chances are total usage will be well under 100%, but a lot of time 1 core will be pushed to the limit.

This is where single thread performance matters and for that, you need a latest CPU, so a 13xxx series from Intel or the new 7000 series from AMD. Youtube reviews etc of CPU’s are good for this, ignore game benchmarks, etc and look for Cinebench R23 Single thread results, that way you can compare the 11700K to current gen CPU’s.

You’ll likely find the latest ones are a good 20%+ faster.

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Ah, another general thought re: CPU - if you’re using freestyle or grease pencil for NPR, CPU becomes a big factor. Freestyle and Grease Pencil aren’t multi-threaded, so you take a big speed hit using those. Psoft Pencil is multi-threaded, so quite a bit faster as a result. But of course, not free.

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Thank you for such an indepth reply. Here is a screengrab of my Task manager as I am running one such heavy Blender scene in eevee rendered view, with the viewport feeling sluggish and choppy.

Does this tell you anything?
It doesnt seem to be using more than a big third of the VRAM and RAM? But It also says its at 100% Utilization.

Thanks!

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Yup, that tells me a lot. First, you have a 3060 12GB version and that the GPU is getting hammered. If that is like the upper end of the sort of work you do, then a newer/faster GPU will very likely help a lot. Having said that, you don’t really need a 3090/4090 for the VRAM, since you are only using 5GB at the moment.

That’s not to say the speed wouldn’t help, but even 8GB VRAM would cover it. So something like say a 4070/Ti which has 12GB VRAM would still be a big speed boost and leave plenty of VRAM for the future, while costing way less then a 3090/4090.

The other part, being the CPU is hard to see. While it is only showing 9% usage, that could still be a single core going flat out. If that’s the case then any GPU update could still be held back, if the GPU ends up waiting for the CPU.

This is one of the things I looked at in my video, when I upgraded from a 1070 Ti to a 3080 Ti. While on one level the speed improvement was massive, but for some things, it made no difference, as the CPU was the bottleneck.

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Thank you so much for your help here Tony, this is great! The video is great too!

I am looking into the CPU / GPU dilemma.

All the best!