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Help with selecting second GPU dedicated for ArchiCAD

estugarda
Participant

Hi!,

I'm building a new workstation for ArchiCAD 26-28 with Livesync with Lumion, Twinmotion and probably Unreal 5.

It will be a somewhat high-end machine based on AMD 7950X3D on Asus Proart x670e with fast DDR5 and NVME M.2SSD, with 2 QHD displays and 1 4K premium color display. There will be strong emphasis on GPU realtime rendering in Unreal based apps. Hence the X3D CPU and gaming GPU. I definitely decided to go for RTX4090 for rendering and editing in Lumion, Twinmotion and Unreal, and maybe some minimal Redshift and Blender (QHD display), but I was planning to add another GPU for running just ArchiCAD and the rest of the system on separate displays (4K and 1 QHD). For this reason I chose a premium 1300W PSU. Now I am wondering which GPU I should use. I currently have GTX 1080 ti (running on a 2018-ish high-end Threadripper 2950x workstation on midrange DDR4 and PCIE 3 NVME), which was OK for Lumion rendering (sans RTX), but I always felt like it wasn't very smooth in complex plans, models and sections in ArchiCAD. For comparison; workstation in my company running on Ryzen 5600x and 1660ti seams to be smoother.  So this might've been bottle-necked by the other parts of the system, but I could never tell. I fear that GTX 1080ti might handle 4K resolution badly even on this new system. So I wonder if I should go in direction of RTX 4060 ti or maybe in a pro direction like RTX A2000/A4000 (a4000 being just slightly over the budget, although I'd rather spent it elsewhere) for the second GPU. Would there be any significant improvement in modelling and editing plans, sections, elevations and layouts compared to GTX 1080ti on 4k?

I was also considering using the 7950x3d's iGPU for editing in ArchiCAD only while rendering, and using RTX4090 for everything while not rendring, as the very budget option. Would that work at all? I am especially worried about the display adapter switching part of it. I know iGPU on that CPU is only GPU bound so it shouldn't take away much performance from RTX4090 rendering, or am I wrong?

Thanks!

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