Member mansfield Posted September 29, 2015 Member Report Share Posted September 29, 2015 Hey all, Just got a new graphics tablet after my old wacom died back in feb, but trying to get back into 3DC its clear my rig needs a bit more horsepower. However I'm still a bit weak financially. However I reckon I can scrape enough together for either a new CPU or GPU. So I was wondering is 3DC more CPU or GPU intensive for sculpting? Which one would be the best choice? If its GPU, which is better overall for 3DC - Nvidia or AMD? I've been an AMD user for ages, but TBH I find thier driver support rather a poor show, so I am already thinking about a switch to Nvidea. Regards, Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member L'Ancien Regime Posted September 30, 2015 Advanced Member Report Share Posted September 30, 2015 Well forget CUDA. It's on the backburner and basically Andrew has washed his hands of it. No updates on CUDA for a long time. I'd say CPU and amount of RAM.. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Reputable Contributor AbnRanger Posted September 30, 2015 Reputable Contributor Report Share Posted September 30, 2015 Well forget CUDA. It's on the backburner and basically Andrew has washed his hands of it. No updates on CUDA for a long time. I'd say CPU and amount of RAM.. +1. Cuda does help with Voxel brushes, but that's about it. Voxels are good for boolean type effects, but so much effort has gone into Surface mode that it is probably where you want to do most of your sculpting, from start to finish...and it's not CUDA accelerated. CPU probably has the biggest impact in 3D Coat, and Intel works even better than AMD CPU's. The reason for this is that Andrew uses Intel's TBB (Thread Building Blocks) Library, and Intel CPU's naturally operate much more efficiently than an AMD. I know this from experience. Used both, and comparable CPU's. With that said, things are about to heat up on the CPU front, after about a 5yr lull (because AMD pretty much stopped competing for the high-end market). AMD is due to release a 16-core desktop CPU with the equivalent to Intel's Hyperthreading, which would give it 32 threads. It's called ZEN, and you know Intel has been holding back all this time, so they will probably respond with a 16 core variant, themselves, about the same timeframe (1st Qtr, 2016) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member L'Ancien Regime Posted September 30, 2015 Advanced Member Report Share Posted September 30, 2015 +1. Cuda does help with Voxel brushes, but that's about it. Voxels are good for boolean type effects, but so much effort has gone into Surface mode that it is probably where you want to do most of your sculpting, from start to finish...and it's not CUDA accelerated. CPU probably has the biggest impact in 3D Coat, and Intel works even better than AMD CPU's. The reason for this is that Andrew uses Intel's TBB (Thread Building Blocks) Library, and Intel CPU's naturally operate much more efficiently than an AMD. I know this from experience. Used both, and comparable CPU's. With that said, things are about to heat up on the CPU front, after about a 5yr lull (because AMD pretty much stopped competing for the high-end market). AMD is due to release a 16-core desktop CPU with the equivalent to Intel's Hyperthreading, which would give it 32 threads. It's called ZEN, and you know Intel has been holding back all this time, so they will probably respond with a 16 core variant, themselves, about the same timeframe (1st Qtr, 2016) There's a 56 thread Xeon in the works, and e5 and e7 Xeons will be combined. That 56 thread Xeon will have around 600gb of RAM devoted to it on the motherboard, and the motherboards will have up to 8 sockets so 8 sockets times 56 threads will mean 448 threads with somthng like 5 or 6 Terabytes of ddr 4 RAM... Crazy hunh? http://wccftech.com/intel-skylake-purley-platform-upto-28-cores-56-threads/ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Reputable Contributor AbnRanger Posted September 30, 2015 Reputable Contributor Report Share Posted September 30, 2015 There's a 56 thread Xeon in the works, and e5 and e7 Xeons will be combined. That 56 thread Xeon will have around 600gb of RAM devoted to it on the motherboard, and the motherboards will have up to 8 sockets so 8 sockets times 56 threads will mean 448 threads with somthng like 5 or 6 Terabytes of ddr 4 RAM... Crazy hunh? http://wccftech.com/intel-skylake-purley-platform-upto-28-cores-56-threads/ Yeah, but this isn't a desktop solution. More like an uber-expensive studio workstation. The AMD Zen CPU is for desktops. I think AMD lulled Intel into sleep, so they could re-emerge a few years later, with a pretty heavy blow. Intel has been content to keep consumers restricted to just 6-cores for the past 5yrs, when they could have easily doubled or tripled that number. I'm glad AMD is getting back into the fight, with a relatively new CEO who seems much more ambitious than the previous one. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PolyHertz Posted September 30, 2015 Report Share Posted September 30, 2015 There's a 56 thread Xeon in the works...will have around 600gb of RAM devoted to it on the motherboard, and the motherboards will have up to 8 sockets so 8 sockets times 56 threads will mean 448 threads with somthng like 5 or 6 Terabytes of ddr 4 RAM... That sounds like something you'd rent time on, not own... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member L'Ancien Regime Posted September 30, 2015 Advanced Member Report Share Posted September 30, 2015 (edited) This is the way to the PROMISED LAND my children http://wccftech.com/custom-sff-radeon-r9-nano-rig-packs-10-tflops-performance-xeon-e52699-v3-18-core-processor/ AMD’s Radeon R9 Nano is an impressive SFF (Small Form Factor) graphics card that packs a lot of punch and shows what’s possible with the HBM architecture. DGLee managed to get a sample of the Radeon R9 Nano graphics card and made a custom SFF Mini-ITX rig with it that packs a total of 10 TFlops of performance under its hood.Read more: http://wccftech.com/custom-sff-radeon-r9-nano-rig-packs-10-tflops-performance-xeon-e52699-v3-18-core-processor/#ixzz3nFYzGJo4 Edited September 30, 2015 by L'Ancien Regime Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Contributor Tony Nemo Posted September 30, 2015 Contributor Report Share Posted September 30, 2015 Sob! I need CUDA for Octane! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member Grimm Posted September 30, 2015 Advanced Member Report Share Posted September 30, 2015 Octane will support AMD when OToy finishes 3.0 sometime in the next few months. Although I'm not sure that OpenCL will ever be faster than CUDA. From the initial tests that the Octane devs have done on OpenCL they have found that AMD cards are not as fast. I don't know which ones they tested though, so YMMV. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Member mansfield Posted September 30, 2015 Author Member Report Share Posted September 30, 2015 Since I gave up multiplayer gaming a few years ago, I stopped following all the latest H/W updates, and throwing endless cash at getting an extra 5fps. With all these changes just over the horizon, I may as well lumber on with this old rig for a little longer, and await the price drop for the current high end gear - get a better bang for the buck. Thanks for the input. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Reputable Contributor AbnRanger Posted October 1, 2015 Reputable Contributor Report Share Posted October 1, 2015 Sob! I need CUDA for Octane! I was checking out the AMD FuryX cards, recently, and surprisingly, it doesn't outperform Nvidia's GTX 980ti in most tests I saw. I guess that's why it's priced about the same as the 980Ti. I saw an NVidia presentation by their CEO, over a year ago, where they mentioned their next gen cards would have HBM memory and such, so I guess the race will be on, for real, in both the CPU and GPU markets, around the 1st Qtr of next year. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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