GPU vs CPU-
Which makes iClone do the following 'faster':
1) render frames
2) UI's navigational smoothness (when scene contains high res materials)

And, did anyone ever experience a genuine speed upgrade in either of the above by upgrading a component of their hardware?

Tony - Stepping up to a GTX 1018i card with 6GB of RAM made a marked increase in speed for me! (Still need MORE speed!)  ~V~

       Val RogueAnanda

Beefy video card and an SSD C: drive made all the difference for me!



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+1


If you have a moderate, but balanced system, upgrading your graphics card will be probably the best place to spend your money first, for iClone.  More VRAM on the GPU will give you room for larger projects with larger textures before getting bogged down.

An SSD is a great enhancement to your overall system.  It boots and loads applications faster, but it doesn't fix an underpowered GPU or CPU - it enhances and otherwise adequate sytem.  I'd start with a 500GB drive these days, with a 1TB or larger traditional drive for your bulk storage.

Increasing your CPU never hurts, but you may also run into needing to buy a new motherboard, too, depending on the upgrade.  But generally speaking, it has less of an impact for iClone than the GPU does.

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iClone 7... Character Creator... Substance Designer/Painter... Blender... Audacity...
Desktop (homebuilt) - Windows 10, Ryzen 9 3900x CPU, GTX 1080 GPU (8GB), 32GB RAM, Asus X570 Pro motherboard, 2TB SSD, terabytes of disk space, dual  monitors.
Laptop - Windows 10, MSI GS63VR STEALTH-252, 16GB RAM, GTX 1060 (6GB), 256GB SSD and 1TB HDD

Go for the better GPU if you want better performance for rendering and navigation. An SSD does not effect the speed at which a program runs.

Thanks for the replies everyone!
So it will be the GPU which allows a smoother interface experience, and also the rendering speed.
It would be easy to say, "you can adjust a scene, in itself, to work better", but I am very much here interested in the hardware's effect, as opposed to what I can do to maximize a scene. 
I am strictly interested in the hardware components themselves, so I very much appreciate the focused responses on that level! 

To be clear, the GPU should not have much, if any, impact on the interface responsiveness in most cases.  At least I'm pretty sure that is a true statement.
Opening the timeline, selecting an object in your scene, opening a properties panel, most of those things are probably more affected by CPU and system RAM.

Rotating your camera, navigating around your scene, scrubbing the timeline, previewing the scene, rendering the scene... those will be GPU-intensive activities.

Do you have a couple specific actions where the performance is bothering you?

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iClone 7... Character Creator... Substance Designer/Painter... Blender... Audacity...
Desktop (homebuilt) - Windows 10, Ryzen 9 3900x CPU, GTX 1080 GPU (8GB), 32GB RAM, Asus X570 Pro motherboard, 2TB SSD, terabytes of disk space, dual  monitors.
Laptop - Windows 10, MSI GS63VR STEALTH-252, 16GB RAM, GTX 1060 (6GB), 256GB SSD and 1TB HDD

I use a Titan X (non-Pascal) as my main mobo GPU, and feel I get good speed from my CPU. 
Just wondering what type of performance upgrade one could experience from a Titan XP, or even a...
TITAN V:unsure:

Like what would pedal iClone into rendering frames faster and having a smoother UI.

I would add that the amount of system RAM also has an impact, especially for large scenes. 

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I am new to all of this but you might want to keep the following GPUs in mind if you plan to upgrade. In case you decide to get the iRay plugin at some point.

GPUs

It doesn't sound like it applies to your situation right now but perhaps later. It also gives ideas for cloud rendering and maybe that would be something to consider if doing time sensitive work. I haven't priced it myself.