Hardware Recommendations

[gschulbach]

Apologies if this has been covered here before or somewhere I can't find, but I'd be curious to hear what sources people use for building PC hardware? Where do you go to put together the specs and purchase a custom PC?

I'm planning on building a machine which has a balance between good on-screen performance running Autodesk Alias and Keyshot renderings. Running windows 10, one 4K monitor, desktop. Autodesk recommends an NVIDIA NVIDIA Quadro P4000 card or similar.

Any help would be appreciated.

Cheers,
Gary

[mafrieger]

Just have a look at the benchmark section to get a feeling regarding speed of different hardware:
https://forum.keyshot.com/index.php?board=36.0
GPU rendering is the fastest option. To get most of it, you should select from latest "Ampere" Generation of Nvidia.
A Quadro/Pro is not needed for KS (don't now if Alias really depend on it)
For KS: just choose from the consumer RTX line the one you can/want afford.... no matter if 3060/70/80/90 choose the one with most memory.

[KristofDeHulsters]

I recently purchased an RTX3080 and I am very happy with the speeds I am getting. It caps at 10GB so if you have very large scenes you might want to step up from there. It gives great bang for your buck, I couldn't render without GPU anymore.

[sleby]

Have a look at quadro a4000, about the same price as 3080 but with more memory.

[KristofDeHulsters]

Have a look at quadro a4000, about the same price as 3080 but with more memory.

3080 is faster though than the 4000. Most benchmark websites also agree that a 3080 is better than the 4000. https://technical.city/en/video/GeForce-RTX-3080-vs-RTX-A4000

[sleby]

In games, sure. Would be interesting to see the performance comparison from Keyshot though.

[KristofDeHulsters]

You want to give it a shot to have a definitive answer? We could both render out the same scene and see which card comes on top for Keyshot!

[sleby]

I sadly do not own the GPU mentioned above. I just suggested since I would also consider this GPU if I'd be on a hunt for an upgrade at this rtx-scarce time.

[KristofDeHulsters]

Oh I see, no worries. Yeah the backed up supply for the RTX's is a deal breaker in a lot of cases. I waited for months for mine and that was before the real supply chain problems began.

[Niko Planke]

Hey,

i would like to add to you discussion despite the fact that there is a chip shortage.
Performance wise the RTX 3080 will outperform the A4000 by far.

If you want to compare the cards, the Keyshot Viewer comes with a Benchmarking tool specifically for KeyShot, that way you can be sure the render settings are the same.

We managed to find this article https://aecmag.com/workstations/nvidia-rtx-a4000-review-nvidia-rtx-a5000-review-arch-viz-ray-tracing/ where the A4000 scored a 62.34.
Compared to the RTX's 3080 results of 70.83 found here https://forum.keyshot.com/index.php?topic=27020.msg114277#msg114277 , it gets clear that the 3080 will give you better performance.

If you run a benchmark yourself feel free to upload the results in the Benchmark section: https://forum.keyshot.com/index.php?board=36.0

Note that the used driver version can make a difference, so your results might diverge a bit.

Keep in mind that the mount of memory will limit the size of scenes you can render. If you often work with models of Large industrial machines, high resolution texture-maps or frequently use the geometry shaders(e.g. displacement and Fuzz), having more memory will give you more headroom.