I am considering to build a desktop pc for 3d modelling and some rendering, mostly still images. Not interested in AI/crypto stuff, where apparetly most progress is focused. How should I think about it? Does it still make sense to avoid Nvidia? Maybe even second-hanf market is worth attention now?
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Nvidia still has a lead on rendering performance. Of course vram will be quite important as well.
Nvidia drivers do work.
I can say this:
I am both poor, and cheap. And as a result, I tend to basically upgrade my equipment continuously until it reaches the ultimate hard-stop; which is where the motherboard itself just won’t support any newer hardware.
My current setup for not only Blender, but also video editing in Resolve and Kdenlive, Motion graphics in both Resolve and/or Natron, medium to heavy gaming (not on ultimate settings of course) is almost 10 years old (2016) with a 3060 midrange nvidia card, 16 gigs of RAM, a upgraded 750 watt power supply and a pathetically old AMD A-10 7800 cpu.
It works fine. More than fine. Using Linux it’s plenty powerful enough to do what I need it to do. Would I like to be able to afford a more powerful one? Sure. But I don’t need it.
The caveat I’ll say to that is that my blender modeling isn’t heavy on animation, though it is fairly complex (flyable aircraft with 3D interiors for X-Plane…so a good number of animations, but nothing complex like human walking or anything.)
I’m not doing modeling, just gaming, but my 7800xt has been incredible. It’s been a few years since I had an Nvidia card, but at least back then I had a lot of issues with Wayland, multi monitor support, etc. I’m sure a lot of it is cleaned up by now, but with an AMD GPU I don’t even have to think about it.
An Arc B580 might serve you well. I’m a Radeon user myself, though, so I can’t speak from firsthand experience on using Arc cards for Blender.
I use a 3090 with ZorinOS and it has some drawbacks (for some reason would not dim the screen when inactive until recently, tearing in most games, sometimes have to tweak nvidia drivers for games to work), but as far as i know, not many for 3d rendering itself (i haven’t rendered big scenes though, but i’ve worked quite some time testing shaders, modeling or tracking and no issue for now).
Maybe nvidia bad reputation with linux applies mostly to gaming, but i’m not that sure.
Seems to me like the (online, non-used) GPU market is still messed up, or at least stunted (bloated?) compared to CPUs (pricing as a factor). So I guess I’m sticking with the 1050Ti still.
I’m pretty sure the modifier crashing I’ve had was just a Blender thing either way.
I have RTX 3060 laptop and after a bit of fiddling during installation (drivers and blender) it works. Right now I am driving Bazzite and blender flatpak.
