I’ve been working with Blender for 6 years, and I’m getting better and better. My problem is, that I often work with heavy scenes where my Computer reaches the limit. So I had the idea to enhance my hardware, but because I’m not into the hardware stuff, I don’t know what I need.
My Problems:
Currently I’m working on a very high poly Spaceship. For the viewport I’ve turned the SubD modifier to 0, and for the final render to 1. When turning it to two, blender just closes when hitting f12, without an error.
When working with a lot of textures, Blender gets slow
Substance Painter crashes sometimes, when working with many or high res Textures. When saving the project, it takes up til 4 minutes. (Substance Painter is located on my SSD, but im saving it on my HDD).
Substance Painter crashes sometimes, when working with many or high res Textures. When saving the project, it takes up till 4 minutes. (Substance Painter is located on my SSD, but I’m saving it on my HDD).
I THINK, that I could improve most of the problems with a better graphics card. Currently I have an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070. Is it possible to just buy another NVIDIA graphics card, and then use both? Even if they are not the same? (like gtx 1070 and rtx 2080)
I want to buy a second monitor.
Whenever you start dealing with extremely high poly items its recommended to use cpu and ram instead of gpu because of the ram limitations of a gpu. Or buy an extremely expensive GPU with a ton of ram.
What Motherboard do you have? As a soft rule of thumb you Motherboard should cost at least half of what your processor does, if you want to avoid a bottle neck in it.
Your cpu is fine. You could double RAM amount to 32gb, add a much larger ssd (1TB costs just over 100$ these days) and save/export SP textures you’re currently using inside it and not the hdd (use it for long term storage only). Your gpu is good. I have the same gpu and things get slower when the scene is heavy, but that’s normal. Adding an RTX gpu won’t improve your viewport performance dramatically.
PS Motherboards usually have nothing to do with performance and system speed, except only if there are connectivity issues with multiple devices that are sharing the same system resources, but I don’t think this is the case here. Your system is fine.
I gave your post a like, but I have to disagree with the quoted part a little bit. The VRM too can matter a lot. There are multiple reasons for why a CPU might throttle, VRM ripple and throughput being amongst them.
Thank you all for the nice answers. I dont really think it is a “Problem”. I think it is just normal, that my PC cant handle such big scenes, with so many textures so well. I dont have performans issues in the viewport. Just when doing coomands like ctrl + z or f12 it takes time.
Keep in mind you are still doing a very specific and demanding task. RAM is the part that will cover you the most and over all 3D cases, since it is involved in every part of the pipeline. “Professional” Cards like a RadeonPro or a Quadro just cost, but don’t deliver. In this times, they even need to cap certain gaming cards to have at least a little argument to sell them.
For the pure editing tasks, your system is fine and if you increase the amount of system memory, you may get one more resolution step in Substance or 3-5M workable poly budget in Blender.
For rendering, your GPU Memory will limit, with 2.8 it can use system memory too, but im not aware how stable it is and what performance impact it allows for. So for rendering, there is just no hardware out there that can handle it (no matter of the amount of money you throw at it). You will have to stack workstations or server racks to keep things able to render.
A Threadripper, Epyc or 3900X platform with 32gb memory is currently the best platform you can get for DCC tasks.
As an option for rendering, you may have a look at cloud rendering. It may be a good choice for a single project.
The render time is not that bad. Especially because im not animating it. My Spaceship for example has 4M polys without Subsurf modifier. Subsurf at lvl 1 its 16M. So i can understand, why it is not rendering at lvl 2 Im just worried, that when bringing the Textures from Substance Painter to Blender, i wont Render. The Whole Spaceship is seperated into 44 Objects, and every object gets a 2k texture set. I had to be 44, because i also want close ups. Even know you cant realy go that near. Another reason is, that eaven now unwrapping takes time.
That’s the point i was about. Not every step has the same hardware demands, but you will have a hard time to find one that does not eat a lot of memory. Substance and Quixel’s Suite also require a big amount of system memory for high-res maps. When rendering with Cycles and the GPU, the whole scene BVH and textures need to fit in the GPU memory, hence the crash (lucky when you get a Cuda out of memory error, instead of just closing Blender). Keep in mind there is other stuff going on your rig that want some hardware ressources too.
For highpoly scenes you may get away with helpers like decimate or simple placeholder/lowres textures for editing purposes.
Im just worried, that when bringing the Textures from Substance Painter to Blender, i wont Render. The Whole Spaceship is seperated into 44 Objects, and every object gets a 2k texture set. I had to be 44, because i also want close ups. Even know you cant realy go that near. Another reason is, that eaven now unwrapping takes time.