I can't wait to read your experience. )

You don't sound very well. You might get the rest of the office sick if you stay.

Working from home and emailing in sick is so much better than practicing your dying voice and calling in like you used to have to.
Technology is great.

Creator of the free website:
PixelDatabase.Net
A Free Online Text Based Image Editor

Personally, I'm most interested in the realtime video rendering ability of the RTX with iClone. I haven't seen anybody discuss that, but maybe I missed it. We ARE going to be able to do that -- RIGHT?  I am patient but curious.

And then there is the Vulkan API. It is my understanding that by installing the Vulkan API in W7, I will be able to make use of the RTX drivers. Anybody tried that yet? Any comments? Am I right in believing I don't need DX12?

I've been window shopping. IMO, the RTX2070 is the bang-for-the-buck leader. Opinions?

I hope it's not too soon to ask these questions. If this has already been discussed and it went past me, I would be grateful for a link.

Thanks all...


"Less clicks good, more clicks bad."

We have had some earlier discussion, but nothing conclusive. 

The new RTX capabilities (as in real-time ray-tracing) are not relevant for iClone, except for Iray, which has not been updated by Nvidia yet to make use of RTX.

The card itself is faster, but not by a lot for applications like iClone. The amount of VRAM is really the most important, so a GTX 1080 Ti is better than a GTX 2070. Unfortunately, most benchmarks are game-oriented and often not very meaningful when it comes to iClone.

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Right.  The Old Buffer (who if he didn't start this thread has certainly contributed a lot to it) ran some tests but initially they were disappointing (they were four times or more longer than my Titan card, for example).  He has since said his PC may be the biggest issue, and posted a somewhat better test (still 3x as long as my Titan card to render the same scene).

Overall, looking at the specs, I would not expect the RTX to be better than the Titan -- it *might* get within 1/2 of the speed, but the Titan will be the clear winner for rendering strictly inside of iClone's renderer.  Even the 1080Ti will match it or at least come very close, so the best P/P ratio is always going to be that card (if available -- I understand it's getting scarce).  The RTX technology isn't that impressive for anything other than what it was built to do (games that use it -- for that it's unbeatable).  Unless they specifically change the iClone render for that purpose, that will continue to be the case (and the odds of THAT happening are slim and zero, and Slim just left town).

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Alienware Aurora R16, Win 11, i9-149000KF, 3.20GHz CPU, 64GB RAM, RTX 4090 (24GB), Samsung 870 Pro 8TB, Gen3 MVNe M-2 SSD, 4TBx2, 39" Alienware Widescreen Monitor
Mike "ex-genius" Kelley

Well, this is both disappointing and unexpected. Rendering time being the Achilles Heel of a program like iClone, and Reallusion being happily married to Nvidia hardware, and the RTX being purpose-built to tackle that task, I took for granted that Reallusion would be literally all over it. And now I find that Reallusion has met it with - what - silence? And we don't even know why? There's not even a ROADMAP?? Nothing could surprise me more.

This will cause me to change my plans for the coming year... to what, I'm not sure. I think I'm already acquainted with my rendering options, but I'm open to recommendations.
Thanks.



"Less clicks good, more clicks bad."

OK. I get it. This revolves around Nvidia, who will not get off the dime before Spring 2019 at the earliest. Add Reallusion's response time, and we'll be lucky to see RTX animation rendering by Labor Day. It will be a year from now before we actually know what it is capable of. Well, I guess I bought into the marketing hype when I'm old enough to know better. So long as I know it will come eventually, I will pace myself for it. I don't have any better ideas.



"Less clicks good, more clicks bad."

Yeah, I think it would have been nice for Reallusion to give us some kind of indication towards their intention considering how important rendering speed/the real-time nature of this tool is. but for now it seems like business as usual. I was excited too but I guess Reallusion has to make their decisions mostly on what people have or are likely to buy soon and perhaps it's too early to say that realtime ray tracing will really take off. I read that the lower end RTX cards won't even have real-time ray tracing so the card's headline feature might not even end up being that common among users in the end.

Sadly my system is way under parr to run an rtx, Ive got too many bottlenecks so running the iclone native render tests my rtx isnt able to run at full pelt. Its about half the speed of a titan for now.  Where it does come into it's own is using Iray which is what I bought it for. It is very quick indeed.. the pics below took less than 20 secs ,,   way less usually. NB. all preview renders not background.


Homebuilt computer - Windoze 10, INTEL i9 9900 k @ 5.1 GHz, EVGA RTX 2080 TI XC ULTRA, 16GB 3100 MHz RAM, Asus  Maximus Hero XI motherboard, Sound blaster Z series. iClone6 & 7 Pipeline, Crazytalk 8, Crazytalk Animator 2, Facefilter, Pop video 3, Hitfilm 4Pro, Cubase 8.5 Pro,

Let's be clear here -- there are at least three separate issues.

1) iClone's renderer.  The RTX series is, as any good GPU is, capable of rendering within the GPU quickly.  Not nearly as quickly as the Titan, and only marginally better than the 1080Ti, but certainly acceptable.  But the RTX architecture (the "magic" that makes it do the things it shows off in the demos) isn't "connected" in any way to the iClone renderer and will almost surely never be.  iClone would have to re-engineer their code to take advantage of it in the same way that new games have to do so, and we all know that isn't going to happen.  Or, to put it another way, if they ARE going to completely redo their renderer it will most likely benefit almost anyone with any modern GPU card (they aren't going to tie themselves to one card.  Just ain't gonna happen).  NVidia can't do anything about this (they certainly aren't going to change their card to benefit iClone).

2) IRay rendering.  The RTX, again, is a good GPU and may well perform extraordinary when the IRay plugin for iClone is released.  But, again, it's not optimized for IRay.  That special "magic" of the card isn't IRay but a kind of pseudo raytracing (it isn't even real raytracing) that works IF the code is written to work with it.  My gut tells me it might work very well with IRay but I would also doubt it will make IRay acceptable for most doing animation (I would LOVE to be proven wrong with this -- perhaps TheOldBuffer can tell us what rendering times are with CC3 IRay and then we'll really know something).

3) Price/Performance -- all of this comes down to what you want to pay and what you get for it.  If you are buying the RTX based on the RTTX stuff it can do -- forget about it for iClone.  Won't matter.  If you are buying on the basis of using it for other things (not rendering things) it's the best you can get.  Playing certain games on it will kill.  Nothing will come close.  And perhaps it will indeed do Iray better than any current card out there.  But at this point in time and even in the next year or so, my hunch is there are a LOT better deals out there.  Buying this card won't "futureproof" you unless you are strictly a gamer because in a year's time there will be a newer, better card out there (although then you can certainly get better deals on the RTX).

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Alienware Aurora R16, Win 11, i9-149000KF, 3.20GHz CPU, 64GB RAM, RTX 4090 (24GB), Samsung 870 Pro 8TB, Gen3 MVNe M-2 SSD, 4TBx2, 39" Alienware Widescreen Monitor
Mike "ex-genius" Kelley