FWIW, here's my 2 cents..

I have a Win 10 system I purchased last year from CyberPowerPC
It has an Intel i7-6800K CPU @ 3.40GHz
32 GB RAM

I have a GeForce GTX 1080 (foundation version) and a GeForce GTX 980Ti both installed.
Frankly, you only need one unless you're doing hi-end rendering with programs like Octane.

I purchased the 1080 for a number of reasons:

1. I want to do VR and it's probably the best performance/value for hi-end VR like Occulus and HTC Vive (I use it with both)

2. I also want to use it for non-biased photoreal rendering with products like Octane. The 1080 performs very well, and coupled with the 980Ti, the two perform very nicely.

3. Pascal is the 'latest-greatest' and I expect buying now at the early stage extends the life of this architecture.

4. Because it's such a standard, I also expect future programs to continue to optimize for the 1080 and future Pascal architectures.

5. I prefer the "leading edge" not the "bleeding edge." I don't want to have to research, debug, install beta drivers, etc. in order to use a device. Certainly there are faster and more expensive cards / rigs out there, but then you get in the game of continually having to know which device works with which setup, etc.. I just don't have time for that.

6. Unity (and UE4) have both announced support for Octane to bake textures. As I've mentioned previously, if you *learn* Unity, you can create stunning renders (like KeyShot and/or Octane) plus 8K animations in near real-time (based on the 1080 board). I can render individual 4K images in the time it takes me to move the camera view-- just press the snapshot button and it saves a 4K image to disk. Just amazing. And when Octane (announced it will be FREE for Unity) comes out later this summer, it will be a game changer as far as realtime rendering goes. Check this out!

https://youtu.be/8ecfZF-IuSI?t=2m25s

I'm very happy with my decision and my rig has performed extremely well. Purchasing an industry standard hi-end gaming video board is, IMO, the way to go if you're focussed on rendering. If for only CAD and 3D printing, it's not necessary.

Hi Chipp!

Thanks a lot for sharing your real-life point of view. Much appreciated!

After many, many hours (late at night) spent to pick the best components for my actual needs,
this is the (almost) definitive configuration of my next pc :

Cases Cooler Master ATX MasterBox 5 Tower
Mb Intel 1151 MSI Z270 SLI PLUS Chipset Z270
Cpu Intel Core i7-7700K (4,20Ghz/4,50Ghz) 1151 BOX KABY LAKE
Arctic liquid freezer 240 for the CPU
2x16 Memory D4 3000 32GB C15 Corsair Ven K2
PSU 650W EVGA SuperNOVA GQ (or maybe 750W)
SD SAMSUNG 960 EVO NVMe SSD, PCIe 3.0 M.2 Typ 2280 - 500 GB
HDD int. 3,5 2TB Seagate Barracuda [ST2000DM006]

for the GPU I have to choose between these two brutal custom 1080 Ti :

Svga MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Armor 11G OC : occupies the space of 2+ slots

Svga Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Gaming OC 11G : : occupies the space of 2 slots


For the moment I think I don't need FP64 performance more than the actual 1080 Ti (about 340 GFlops in double precision, 1/32 of FP32)
because I don't need to use scientific or financial calculation software or physics simulations.
I hope that the 11 TFlops !! in FP32 should be enough for realtime unbiased GPU rendering, 3d modelling and GPU 2D Painting with Photoshop CC,
and also for moderate CAD modelling with Rhino 3D and Moi.

Also for the moment I don't need a CPU with more than 4 physical but I need a CPU with the best single core performance,
and I think i7-700K it's the best for now, and is also easily overclockable.

I hope that I choose a valid config, that is, I hope I don't have to switch to a (lower performance) P4000 Quadro only for bad drivers or other things...

Anyway...I will see.

See you.

This has been a fascinating thread to read as I'm also considering a PC upgrade. Being an AMD fanboy back to the original Athlon days, I was considering a Ryzen CPU and maybe a new Vega card when they finally get released and reviewed. Please let us know how your new rig works out and what your ultimate component choices are. I'd love to hear what works for you and others, and what doesn't as I plan my own new build later this year.

Bob

Same here Bob.

I need much cpu power than anything else, so it's different from Marco.
Amd seems the way to go with the actual Ryzen line, but now this one seems real too :

http://www.tweaktown.com/news/57530/amds-next-gen-threadripper-16c-32t-launch-june/index.html

3.5-3.9GHz 16cores / 32 threads / ddr4 quadchannel ... yummy !

Hi Paq, Bob (APTIVABOY) and everyone.

So...after many others tech articles and direct contacts with all the software house that are developing
all the software that are into my current pipeline, this is the configuration I'm going to buy.

For my actual needs and for my (not big) budget this is one of the best config I can get :

Case : Cases Cooler Master MasterCase Pro 5 Midi-Tower - Black Window
Mother board : Mb Intel 1151 MSI Z270 SLI PLUS Chipset Z270
CPU : Cpu Intel Core i7-7700K (4,20Ghz/4,50Ghz) 1151 BOX
RAM : 2x16 Memory D4 3000 32GB C15 Corsair Ven K2
PSU : 750W EVGA SuperNOVA GQ 80+ GOLD
M.2 SD : SD SAMSUNG 960 EVO NVMe SSD, PCIe 3.0 M.2 Typ 2280 - 500 GB
HDD : 3,5 2TB Seagate Barracuda [ST2000DM006]
CPU Liquid Cooler : Corsair Hydro H110i

And for the GPU : MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Armor 11G OC


All for approximately 2000 Eur (in Italy) (excluding the OS : Windows 10 Pro 64Bit English)

For the CPU, I know that maybe there are faster and powerful solutions, but actually I don't need heavy multicore data crunching,
but instead very fast and reliable single core performance, because all the platform that I currently use for my main job (software developing),
like Android Studio, Microsoft Visual Studio, Xamarin, all that stuff aren't optimized for heavy multicore but require a very good performance per core.

In fact most of daily job is writing and compiling lots of Java/.Net code, and having a cpu liek 7700K + superfast M.2 drive + fast RAM,
makes the difference.
I can't afford nasty surprises for my developing job and I have no experience with CPUs other than Intel, so I decided to get a 7700K.

Speaking about the GPU I need a robust and reliable product that can give me superfast performance for
realtime GPU rendering, 3D modelling, 3D sculping and 2D GPU Painting (with the Photoshop brush engine and other GPU Painting software).

Actually I don't need the huge FP64 performance of a Titan card or a Tesla, and approximately 340 Gflops of 1080 Ti should be more than enough,
also for moderate CAD modelling with Rhino 3D.
And also the actual Quadro series has almost the same FP64 performance of Gtx Pascal cards, that is 1/32 of FP32.

Speaking about Moi, it's so lightweight that with a 1080 Ti/ 7700K I guess it will be so fast that more I can't imagine...

Anyway...I hope to finalize the purchase soon and, hopefully, I will post here how my new rig will work for all my 2d/3d gfx software pipeline.

We'll catch up...

Ciao!

- Marco (mkdm)

Hi everyone!

Some times ago I told you that I wanted to renew my hardware config, and finally I did it :)

For what I'm experiencing in first week of usage it seems a STUNNING AND BLAZING FAST PC!!!

By now I only have to solve some cpu overheat issue due to a wrong thermal paste, but I hope to fix this issue next week.

So... the spec s:

Cases Cooler Master ATX MasterBox 5 Tower
Mb Intel 1151 MSI Z270 SLI PLUS Chipset Z270
Cpu Intel Core i7-7700K (4,20Ghz/4,50Ghz)
2x16 Memory D4 3000 32GB C15 Corsair Ven K2
EVGA SuperNOVA 750 G3, 80 Plus Gold 750W, Fully Modular
SD SAMSUNG 960 EVO NVMe SSD, PCIe 3.0 M.2 Typ 2280 - 500 GB
HDD int. 3,5 2TB Seagate Barracuda
Corsair Hydro H100i V2
ASUS PCE-AC55BT DUAL BAND WIRELESS AC-1200

And last but not least...Svga MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Armor 11G OC

This is a rough visual benchmark recorded with my smartphone. I'm sorry for the very coarse video quality :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jK15z9uwHX0


I simply downloaded the 3dm file contained into this package : https://grabcad.com/library/audi-r8-139
An Audi car made by Mauro Marin.

I then loaded the 3dm model into Moi, Rhino V5 and Rhino V6 WIP to roughly test the viewport performance using different viewing mode.
All tests are made on a very poor FullHD monitor.

The results are absolutely stunning above all when I use the Thea Render realtime GPU engine.

I'm also testing this new HW config with Unity, Blender and Thea Render stand alone and the performance I'm measuring are totally phenomenal!!!

For what I'm experiencing also with the very powerful Rhino, don't believe to anyone who says that you have to buy a Quadro card to have good performance with Rhino.

If all you want to do is rendering and not heavy scientific or engineering calculation, then the new Gtx Pascal 1080 Ti is really a BEAST!!!

And also consider that even the newest Pascal Quadro cards like P5000 or P6000 have THE SAME, I repeat, THE SAME FP64 performance of Gtx 1080 Ti,
that is 1/32 of FP32 performance.

And needless to say, with the 1080 Ti, Moi's performance are absolutely stunning even if you use a heavy "5 degree" mesh angle.

See you.

That's 21th century! ;)

Yeah Pilou :)

I'm also confident that with the new V4 of MOI, Michael leverages on new DirectX library (I hope 12 but also 11 should be fine).

In that way I'm sure that the display performance should skip to a very "serious" level....just in order to push out every power from newest cards.

See you.

Marco (mkdm)

Hi Marco, Direct3D12 isn't supported on Windows 7 and I plan to support Windows 7 for MoI v4. So I'll probably be targeting Direct3D11, not Direct3D12.

MoI is able to batch things together well and not issue so many smaller draw calls and so the lower overhead that you've probably heard about with Direct3D12 might not be much of a factor for MoI anyway.

This is an area that I'm beginning to work on right now.

- Michael

Hi Michael and thank a lot for the info.

@You : "...So I'll probably be targeting Direct3D11, not Direct3D12..."

Well...anyway DX11 should be a big step forward :)

One important thing should be the support for a much better and native antialiasing capabilities.
By now I can control how the different software render their Gfx with Nvidia Control Panel,
but it could be much better if Moi could control natively the internal behavior of DX11 display routines.

I stay tuned.

Have a nice day.

Marco (mkdm)

P.S.

Michael, it could be very useful if leveraging on DX11 routines you could add a "Ghost" display mode,
similar to what Rhino does.

Ghost mode is a very useful feature, good also to create some quick and dirt rendering for visualization purposes.

Thanks.

Hi Marco, unfortunately unlike what you would probably naturally expect, transparency is not something that is automatically provided by low level APIs like Direct3D or OpenGL. It has to be handled by the application drawing polygons in depth sorted order. This has to be done pretty carefully so as not to slow down performance too much. I would like to look into doing it but it doesn't really have anything to do with D3D9 vs D3D11 vs D3D12.

- Michael

Ok Michael.

I understand. Thanks anyway for the detailed info.

Have a nice day.

Hi Marco, then additionally Direct3D12 doesn't automatically "do more stuff" for you than D3D11, it's actually more the exact opposite of that, it's focused on doing less stuff automatically so the programmer controls more of every detail of what's sent to the card. It makes it more possible to fine tune optimizations at a cost of more coding work at the same time though. It certainly doesn't mean that all kinds of effects just come built in and happen with one function call or something like that.

- Michael

Hello Marco,

I can't understand the discussion - I have an 3,5 Years old Computer without any Problem:-)








Have a nice day
Karsten

Hi Karsten.

Well..XEON CPu always a super great hardware :)

But with my (low) budget and for what I have to do, it was more important for me to have great performance in realtime visualization and CUDA cruch.

@You : "I can't understand the discussion - I have an 3,5 Years old Computer without any Problem:-) "

I'm sorry but I don't understand your sentence.
What discussion are you referring to ?

Really no intention for me to "argue" on useless things :)

Only ,I'm talking about my new HW config and how Moi V4 could leverages on the newest powerful GPU like Pascal Gtx,
using the opportunities of a more recent DX libraries.

Nothing more than that.

See you.

Marco (mkdm)

Thanks a lot Michael for clarification.

@You : "...it's focused on doing less stuff automatically so the programmer controls more of every detail of what's sent to the card..."

I imagine that this extra coding work it's useless for Moi's routines.

Well...Just to recap all my discourse....I only would like to see the new Moi V4 using better display routines
that can leverage on the great opportunities offered by modern Gfx cards.

Just in order to use Moi for very quick and easy render for visualization and concept modelling, it could be very useful
if Moi can offer a better antialiasing and a better shading of objects.

Nothing complicated like real render or ambient occlusion or shadow, none of this.

Simply a better and modern viewport display.

But, as you said many times, I know that you are working on it and I'm confident that you are doing a great job, as usual.


With that said, all other aspects of Moi are still absolutely stunning for me :)

Have a nice day.

Marco (mkdm)

Hi everyone.

If anybody's interested, this is a simple and quick performance comparison for my new PC based on i7-7700K + Gtx 1080 Ti,
that I purchased some weeks ago.

It's a simple comparison with my old Laptop based on i7-4790K+Quadro K3100M.

I did this test using latest unofficial version of Blender (2.79).

This is the final render (1920x1080 512 Sample) :



These are the scene rendering setup :
1920x1080 512 samples, 1 material with "Principled BSDF" PBR Shader, HDRI Background and illumination
Light Paths :





And these are the results :

-------------------------
Laptop Clevo P771ZM :
-------------------------
CPU : i7-4790K 4.00 - 4.40 Ghz
RAM : 32 Gb (2x16) HyperX Impact DDR3L-1600 CL9
GPU : Nvidia Quadro K3100M 4GB 768 Cuda Cores
HD : 512GB 850 EVO Basic SSD Sata 6Gb/s

BEST CPU RENDERING TIME (Tile Size 16) : 03:34:30 (minutes:seconds:hundredths)
BEST GPU RENDERING TIME (Tile Size 384) : 02:39:65 (minutes:seconds:hundredths)

CPU Tile Size 16 : 03:34:30 * BEST Laptop CPU RESULT
CPU Tile Size 32 : 03:34:66
CPU Tile Size 64 : 03:37:26

GPU Tile Size 64 : 03:55:92
GPU Tile Size 96 : 03:22:19
GPU Tile Size 128 : 03:02:47
GPU Tile Size 192 : 02:48:39
GPU Tile Size 256 : 02:42:66
GPU Tile Size 384 : 02:39:65 ** BEST Laptop OVERALL RESULT
GPU Tile Size 512 : 02:42:14


-------------------------
i7-7700K + Gtx 1080 Ti PC :
-------------------------
CPU : i7-7700K 4.20 - 4.50 Ghz
RAM : 32 Gb (2x16) Corsair Vengeance LPX C15 DDR4-3000Mhz
GPU : Svga MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Armor 11G OC 11GB GDDR5X 3584 Cuda Cores
HD : 500 GB SSD SAMSUNG 960 EVO NVMe SSD, PCIe 3.0 M.2 Type 2280

BEST CPU RENDERING TIME (Tile Size 32) : 02:53:46 (minutes:seconds:hundredths)
BEST GPU RENDERING TIME (Tile Size 512) : 00:26:53 (minutes:seconds:hundredths)

CPU Tile Size 16 : 02:53:59
CPU Tile Size 32 : 02:53:46 * BEST PC CPU RESULT
CPU Tile Size 64 : 02:56:14

GPU Tile Size 64 : 01:35:66
GPU Tile Size 96 : 00:57:40
GPU Tile Size 128 : 00:43:48
GPU Tile Size 192 : 00:34:46
GPU Tile Size 256 : 00:29:78
GPU Tile Size 384 : 00:27:40
GPU Tile Size 512 : 00:26:53 ** BEST PC OVERALL RESULT
GPU Tile Size 640 : 00:27:42
GPU Tile Size 768 : 00:27:77
GPU Tile Size 896 : 00:28:18
GPU Tile Size 1024 : 00:28:52

**************************************
COMPARISON :
**************************************

1) BEST PC CPU vs BEST Laptop CPU : 123.54 %

2) BEST PC GPU vs BEST Laptop GPU : 601.77 %

3) BEST PC GPU vs BEST PC CPU : 653.82 %

4) BEST Laptop GPU vs BEST Laptop CPU : 134.23 %

5) BEST PC GPU vs BEST Laptop CPU : 807.76 %

6) BEST Laptop GPU vs BEST PC CPU : 108.65 %

Ciao!

Address of the file ? it's an OBJ File format?

Hi Pilou.

It's the standard "Suzanne" monkey head of Blender with Level 3 of subdivision.

If I find some spare time I will upload the entire Blender Project with PBR maps.

Ciao.