Hello,
First - I know the intel i9 with Nvidia 3090 is the way to go. Thanks to two previous posts and a lot of helpful information, I have gotten far in my narrowing down the system I need to purchase. The issue I have is I am already way over budget on a project - we switched from a Mac-based animation project to iclone and have a lot of expense - and have not even purchased a PC yet. 

My specific questions are really not what advantages the i9 3090 with 24GB VRAM offers, but what are the problems I will face if I go with an i7 11700k or kf, and an Nvidia 3070 with 8GB VRAM?

My project is, more or less, a Kid, a Pet, in a 3D bedroom. Recording about 50 to 60 minutes worth of material per session, that will be edited down to 20 minutes. Will the i7/3070 accommodate this and what problems/delays should I anticipate, if any?

Let's make it more fun. What if I add one more character and three or four movable props (curtains blowing, a plant that moves around in its pot, etc.). Will this bog the system down? Rendering take forever?

Thank you again in advance for any information.

Take a look at my system specs below. They're anything but top of the line, but I can handle heavy projects by carefully selecting just what is going to be seen by the camera when playing back and rendering scenes out. A scene load can be reduced to a workable size by using lower resolution textures when items are far away from the camera/action. Keeping scenes tight, about 60 to 120 secs, helps when nothing else is possible. Saving each scene as a separate project is the best way to control the load on the system, not only for playback but for rendering. This also helps if something goes wrong during rendering, you may only to re-render a few seconds

Aside from all of the above, the best thing to do is purchase the highest spec, future proof system that you can afford. In the world of animation there is no such thing as too much.

Gerry

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System: Win 10 Pro (21H2), Asus X99-E WS, CPU i7-5930K -3,5 GHz, 32 GB DDR4 2666-16 RAM, NVidia GTX 1080 Ti GPU - 11 GB VRAM(Driver Studio-536.99), Samsung 850 Pro 512 GB SSD, 6 TB HD storage.

Thank you for that. That definitely helps with making decisions. Appreciate it!

Let me be more specific - iClone now requires (we finally learn) 4GB of GPU RAM just to operate.  IOW, a blank scene requires that much.

One character (detailed) usually runs around 2GB more.  A set (usually) isn't much so I wouldn't worry about that.  But for 8GB of GPU ram?  You are unlikely to be able to have more than 2 characters (unless you are willing to wait while the memory swaps to disc and/or work with substitutes and not the real characters, etc. etc.).

If I had only 8GB of GPU I'd shoot myself in the head (no, seriously :>.

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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

Your budget will determine what to get and you have already noted that an i9 plus 3090gpu will blow you out. Me to -I am restling with the same problem but at the end of the day you need 
as much as you can afford for processor speed /  ram amount /  gpu memory and speed / obviously fast SSD and possibly the  OS.
I read that the upcoming Windows Eleven will manage data in a different way leading to faster processing so you might hang on for that or at least reserach it.
I'm finding the Nvidea 3680 is way expensive so am not even contemplating the 3090. None of my local shops seem to have it anyway in keeping with an apparent shortage of chips around the world.
I would sacrifie a bit of system memory for more gpu memory and performance.say 32 gb instead of 64 or 128.
attached table maybe of some use to you
   

Now I reda "Kellytoons "post at the bottom are pc specs.
Alienware Aurora R12, Win 10, i9-119000KF, 3.5GHz CPU, 128GB RAM, RTX 3090 (24GB), Samsung 960 Pro 4TB M-2 SSD, TB+ Disk space
As Iam with i7 and 16gb ram + only 4gb  gpu gtx780m No wonder I am struggling and often wanted to shoot myself.
If Kellytoons system is minimum for good performance I am going to have to up my budget !!! Thats after winning the lottery - ha ha

That's just MY system - it appears at the bottom of any posts I make and is not specific to this topic.

So it's not meant to be "this is what you NEED" in any way shape or form.  Clearly a lot of folks, myself included, use iClone with lesser specifications.  I have a machine with a Titan XP card (with 12GB) that ran iClone very well indeed.  Prior to that I had a 1080 card and then even a 1070 card.  All of them ran iClone just fine... with the caveat they did have their own limitations.

And even the 3090 has limitations - 3D processing takes a TON of power, in every single aspect of a machine.  So, of course, the best machine will run iClone the best.  And lesser machines won't be as good.  But you have to do what you have to do, and even on some of the very slowest machines as long as you have patience and can deal with the limitations you can amazing things.

The OP here wanted to know what sorts of problems they would have and, in general, the lack of GPU memory is the biggest constraint.  I'll repeat again - iClone itself uses 4GB of GPU memory just for an empty scene.  Anything you add to your scene takes up more.  When I only had 8GB of GPU memory I was careful not to have more than a couple of avatars in my scene at any one point in time.  I *could* put more - but it would slow my machine down to a crawl and often cause crashes I could not easily workaround.  Those are just the things you deal with.

And the better cards WILL be available - best estimate now is this spring.  In the meantime just do the best you can and cut your projects down to a more reasonable size and you'll be fine.

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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

When using the 3090, I realized that I have limits too. I can never fill the ram of my 3090 card, but when my scene gets too big, stutters happen. When I look at my system by pressing windows+g, the cpu and ram go up to 70 percent. do you think i should upgrade ram and cpu? Or is the 3090's power insufficient? my system is 8700k. ram is also 16gb.

RAM might help (as a rule you are underpowered - I'd want at least 32GB and more is better) but also remember the iClone has other dependencies that cause issues.  In particular, anytime you have a scene with more than a few dozen objects, no matter HOW much (or little) memory they use the system will grind to a halt.  You can help with this issue by combining objects (so if you have, say, a house with three dozen separate objects just merge them all into one).

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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

Thank you for your interest. do you think i should buy ram with ddr4 32gb ram in my system? or should i buy ram with 12th i7 processor, motherboard, new cooler and new generation ddr5? Is it worth collecting a new system with the 12th generation amd ddr5 ram? or you already have a 3090 video card, would you say that if you install 32 gb ddr4 ram, you will get the best performance? I'm very curious about your opinion as you use the best system