GPU compatible with vray sketchup?

[jackdicker]

I got in touch with the helpdesk at vray. and asked whether they were planning on making vray sketchup 2.0 compatibable with GPU and they replied with this..

 

Jack Dicker,

 

Our customer support team personnel has replied to your support request #690433

 

Hello Jack,

 

The new V-Ray for SketchUp 2.0 will have GPU rendering. V-Ray for SketchUp 2.0, currently just finished it's beta testing, will be fully compatible with SketchUp 2013. We will be making an announcement about the release of V-Ray for SketchUp 2.0 in the next few weeks.

 

Thank you,

Chaos Group USA

[AJLynn]

Oh, good - that's information that wasn't on the main page. Thanks for finding that out.

 

In that case I don't think I'd recommend any hardware changes right now. Wait until more on the GPU feature is available, and see whether it looks useful to you.

[jackdicker]

Thanks Andrew,

 

I will do just that. Im getting it over clocked this weekend and taking it up to 4.5ghz and ill leave it at that till more is released.

 

Jack

[nisanmaxoumov]

Hi All..

Also a question about hardware.

I'm building new system ... couple options in my mind:

 

Xeon E5 2.8GHz (10 Core Cpu), 32GB RAM, 256GB SSD Drive + 2x 1TB Hard Drive, DVDRW worth $4000 with K4000 GPU

Core i7-3930K 3.4Ghz (SIX-Core Cpu), 32GB RAM, 256GB SSD Drive + 2x 1TB Hard Drive, DVDRW worth $2800 with K4000 GPU

Core i7-3770K 3.5Ghz (Four Core), 32GB Ram, 256GB SSD Drive + 2x 1TB Hard Drive, DVDRW worth $2000 with K4000 GPU

 

GPU:

PNY Nvidia Quadro FX3700 with 512MB

PNY Nvidia Quadro K4000 with 3GB

 

GPU will be needed for AutoCad (future thinking).

 

Any advise will be helpful.

Thanks!

[Dimitris Tolios]

Sketchup doesn't use more than one CPU at the time before VRay kicks in. The fastest 3930K or even better 4930K will do better than a lower clocked Xeon, despite the lower core count. Ofc, if you want the best multithread performance for rendering, it is hard to beat top of the line Xeons, tho usually you go dual Xeon for that.

 

K4000 is serious overkill for both Sketchup and Autocad.

The FX3700 would do ok with either, but in general it is "ancient". Going for such an expensive system and even thinking about an FX3700 is out of place - unless you already have it and you don't want to retire it.

 

If you care about VRay 2.0 for Sketchup, get a GTX 760 as a starter, or a 780 or better for faster results.

If you just need something for viewport, a Radeon 7750 (newer equiv. = R7 250~260 = more expensive for no real gain) will do just fine.

Anything more won't give you that much better results.

[nisanmaxoumov]

Thanks Dimitris,

But.. Considering VRay v.3.. and As i understood they gonna use GPU too.. K4000 I can get for same price as GTX780.. and a question who is better (if we are thinking about autocad/3dmax use in future)?

 

Regarding CPU.

So.. it's no use to get DUAL Cpu board machine because of Sketchup?

Xeon 8-core 2.6Ghz vs 4930K vs 4960X What's onna be good solution?

 

Thanks!

[AJLynn]

AutoCAD isn't really all the GPU intensive - current reasonably decent GPUs can handle it easily. Same with SketchUP. I have it on a Radeon 7770 that costs a bit over $100 and it's great. If I were using Max a lot I might spend as much as $200-300 on a GPU.

 

Now, GPUs with Vray, that's a complicated thing. First, Vray in normal mode runs on the CPU only and GPU has nothing to do with how fast it runs. Vray does have RT-GPU mode, which is not the Vray you're probably used to - regular production Vray relies on calculations of a type that GPUs aren't any good at, so they haven't bothered with it. Vray RT-GPU it's more like a Vray version of Maxwell Render that uses GPU. It's quick for some things and slow for others.

 

Vray RT-GPU runs best on a good current generation Geforce card with plenty of memory, and if you're planning a workstation to run it you should have that Geforce card that's for GPU rendering be the second GPU in the system. The first GPU should be some other card, which can be more modest than the render card, and which is used to run the display. The second card should not be running a display, only rendering.

[Dimitris Tolios]

Thanks Dimitris,

But.. Considering VRay v.3.. and As i understood they gonna use GPU too.. K4000 I can get for same price as GTX780.. and a question who is better (if we are thinking about autocad/3dmax use in future)?

 

Regarding CPU.

So.. it's no use to get DUAL Cpu board machine because of Sketchup?

Xeon 8-core 2.6Ghz vs 4930K vs 4960X What's onna be good solution?

 

Thanks!

 

Vray 3.0 is far away still, and that's for 3DS / Maya / C4D.

Vray 2.0 for Sketchup just came out, after quite a few years being stuck to 1.4x. Wouldn't buy a card speculating on 3.0, but based on current Vray RT-GPU requirements.

 

I surely hope they will work out OpenCL mode properly with 3.0, and break the NVidia monopoly in mainstream progressive rendering engines. Should that happen today, a 7950 or R9 280 will probably be much much faster than the 780Ti, the best NVidia offering in the field. Sadly, NVidia is currently the only way to go for VRay RT GPU.

 

AutoCAD won't change much in the future...if anything it will get the same degradation algorithms 3DS and Revit 2014 have, that allow gaming cards to perform just fine with them - at least as far as fps goes (tho the way graphics get proxied in this mode is a knife's edge - irritating some times when you have very complex models).

 

A 780 should be cheaper than a K4000. At least after the Radeon R9 line came out, and the 780Ti launch, 780s flirt the $500 range in the US, while the K4000 is above $700 (that's 780Ti territory). Any 780 or Titan will be vastly faster in Vray RT-GPU than a K4000 or even K5000. I don't know what kind of work you do in either sketchup or ACAD to justify a K4000 to be honest.

 

Regarding CPU: if it is not 2P (dual processor), Xeon has no niche really (unless 64GB of Ram is not enough for you, or you need ECC/Registered Ram). And that niche for a CG artist is rendering speed - only. During modeling, or lightly threaded tasks, all but one thread will be idling. Whether you have 8, 12 or 48. For those that rendering speed is that important to make the investment (and don't want to make a lil farm of cheaper CPUs), only a 2P Xeon system with high end chips ($1,400 a pc and upwards) will give good single threaded performance + great multithreaded.

 

The 49xx or even a 4770 will be faster in most operations, purely due to faster clocks, and in the case of the 47xx, better architecture (Xeons and 48xx/49xx socket 2011 CPUs are still Ivy Bridge EP based, 4770/4570 are Haswell based, that gives them 5-10% advantage @ same clocks.

The 4960X will be the fastest overall, but the price difference is hard to justify over the 4930K really. Thus most people get 4930Ks...50% the price, 95% the performance. By comparison, a good deal

Edited December 17, 2013 by dtolios