RTX3070 8GB or RTX3060 12GB? (is the second ever better for GPU archviz?)

[Walter Chang]

1. Is a RTX3060 (3060, not 3060ti) with 12GB VRAM ever better than a RTX3070 8GB VRAM, for archviz GPU rendering like Enscape or Unreal Engine? The RTX3060 12GB would be a lot slower in fillrate, but for archviz GPU rendering is it ever considered more balanced because of the VRAM?

 

I currently use just a GTX750ti 2GB in Enscape, and I usually run out of VRAM before I run out of fillrate, in scenes with really just an average amount of texture detail - but could it be that 2GB simply is more of a bottleneck for the amount of fillrate the GTX750ti has, than the 8GB is for the RTX3070? I guess for videogames 8GB is considered enough for RTX3070; is it different in archviz?

 

2. Do GPU-based renderers like Enscape, Lumion, Unreal Engine use system RAM for textures etc when VRAM is all used up, at the cost of slower performance? Or is VRAM a hard limit on the size of projects you can render? In my experience it seems the latter - with my 2GB GTX750ti in Enscape, elements in scenes simply disappear and don't get rendered when VRAM is all used up, but my impression could be wrong.

 

(I'm limiting to these 2 GPU choices b/c RTX40xx will draw too much power for my PSU, and b/c of budget. System RAM is currently 16GB; CPU is Ryzen 1700x.)

 

Thanks!

[Francisco Penaloza]

I would go with the 12Gb card. Even though there is a difference in frame rate performance between the RTX 3070 and the RTX 3060, for content creation, that difference is not critical. If we do animations they run at 30Fps or 60FPS sometimes even 24FPS. But Arch Viz scenes are way bigger than game scenes, so any bit of memory will be appreciated.

Enscape, Lumion, Twinmotion, Unreal Unity, will still run at lower frame rate, but they will crash if you run out of memory.

For today's computer standard 2Gb is way to low, for any application in general.

Best Luck.

[Walter Chang]

Thanks. I finally did decide on the 12GB card; I think my experience would be like what you described. I plan to render larger scenes than I have been, and I think the need for VRAM could scale up significantly (above 8GB, especially if using raytracing, which I understand needs a bit of VRAM itself). And as you explained, the VRAM need would be more critical than somewhat of a loss of frame rate performance.

And thanks for clarifying that Enscape, Lumion, Twinmotion, Unreal Unity will crash without enough VRAM.

Thanks again.