what is your graphic card minimum requirement ?

[Christa Noel]

Hi guys,
just curious, what is your graphic card minimum requirement for having smooth fps in viewport and good performance of nVidia AIdenoiser.
usually my scenes are about 10m polys and thinking to change radeon to nVidia because of current AIdenoiser supported by corona.

[Bobbysmith05]

I've been using a Nvidia k2200 works great

[Christa Noel]

thanks Bobby,
i remember some people here said geforce works better than quadro in 3dsMax. i have no idea because of my limited knowledge about gpu.
or any other suggestion please?

[Juraj]

3dsMax isn't very well utilizing of the shader cores, but it can swell the on-gpu VRAM.

If you work on simple scenes, any that has at minimum 6+ GB Vram is ok, otherwise 8GB at least.

Last year, while working on medium complexity interior, my workstation was super smooth and Veronika's lagging like hell. We have same powerful CPUs, 64GB ram, but different GPUs (GTX 1070 8GB, and Titan Maxwell 12GB). Those GPUs actually have very similar performance, so I looked up at VRAM utilization and I was pretty shocked to find that even medium complexity scenes with bunch of 4-8k textures visible in viewport went up to 9GB of VRAM. We upgraded her to 1080ti with 11GB, problem solved.

Otherwise, the amount of FPS almost never changed regardless of how powerful the GPU is. And I've never seen any difference whatsoever for DX11 viewport with Quadro cards (because the hardware is the same, the only difference come when specialized OpenGL driver is used), but people claim otherwise. I call it placebo effect, but I will not dispute things people imagine.

AI Denoiser from nVidia is another reason to get 11GB+ GPU. Older Titan, 1080Ti, etc.. are cards that are decently cheap on second-hand market, and are better choice for strictly 3dsMax than RTX 2080 with 8GB of memory for example. Memory is prime, it's everything.

[Christa Noel]

hi Juraj, thanks for sharing some valuable experience.
may i know more about how complex your "medium" level is? that sounds a bit subjective to me. because sometimes people here said that's normal but people there said that's heavy or something like that. :)

and a dumb question, where can i find vram utilization?

[Juraj]

If you're Windows 10 user, then in Task Manager, Performance Tab, lowest section has it nowadays, very handy :- ).

Yeah medium is very subjective..for me it's roughly something that will take 20 +/- GB of memory during rendering. So something with solid amount of geometry (easily 10+ mil unique triangles) and lot of high-res textures (4-8k, disps often 16bit).
How much the viewport will utilize from GPU Vram, will depend how much is shown in viewport, the more you use proxies with proxy mesh display (low-poly), boxed view of high-poly props, turbosmooth set on "rendering only", textures shown in lower res (<=2k), or not shown actively, etc.. all this will influence it. And then of course, nVidia denoiser.

The more GPU memory you have, the less you need to care about the above. Life is too short to optimize needlessly. ;- ).