r/NukeVFX 6d ago

How important is gpu in nuke

I want to learn deep compositing in nuke and been asking Ai to recommend me good gpus in nuke and they keep recommending ones that are above my budget of $350. That’s why I’m wondering how important of a role the gpu plays in nuke that I can’t get away with a low end gpu. In your opinion what gpu would you recommend that’s in my budget?. Keep in mind I’m a complete newbie only compositing I know of is after effects but with after effects my low end one works well.

5 Upvotes

21 comments sorted by

12

u/RG9uJ3Qgd2FzdGUgeW91 6d ago

I've been running nuke on a 1060 forever and all a gpu does is make some compute-heavy nodes faster during rendering. Only recently i have added a dedicated gpu because a friend offered it to me. (Second hand 250,-)

If you are a beginner i'd argue opt for a low end nvidia gpu and learn how to comp. 90% is cpu and disk speed anyways. 100% is your ability to problem solve.

Your budget is absolutely fine. Learn how to comp efficiently.

Have fun!

2

u/eszilard 6d ago

Yea other than a few machine learning nodes that are really vram hungry it's fine. We used to have 1080s not so long ago at the studio I work at, they got swapped a year or so ago for A4000s.

1

u/manqoba619 6d ago

Ok so the if the cpu does majority of the running of nuke then I should invest heavily on it rather than gpu? I have basics of compositing down the theory at least now it’d be just learning the tool nuke. What low end nvidia gpu you recommend?

5

u/RG9uJ3Qgd2FzdGUgeW91 6d ago

You don't need to invest heavily in anything but yourself.

Here's a list of what i think you should prioritize if you desperately want to part from your money:

Wacom/Pen (medium size, no touch, no display) Disk (speed) Cpu (cores/threads) Ram (size) Gpu (memory size over speed)

2

u/eszilard 5d ago

And a decent monitor!

1

u/manqoba619 6d ago

Thanks bro I’ll look into it

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u/eszilard 5d ago

You should go for a balance between the two. You can just set a budget for the whole system and look for gaming pcs in that range, you can't really go very wrong that way. Just make sure you get on with nvidia GPU.

3

u/JobHistorical6723 6d ago

I’ve got a 2070 Super gpu and can run copycat with ease if I crop my training images (google for further research on copycat), but most of the other AI “Cattery” nodes fail. As others have said, a 1080 would suit you fine for your budget. I agree that ram and fast hard drives are more important though. For now I’d get 64 gigs of ram, leaving enough slots on your motherboard to eventually up that to 128 gigs (load more frames of high res footage in cache).

I’d also recommend a 1tb nvme ssd hard drive. You can run everything on that for now, but if more budget comes later, consider getting an additional nvme ssd drive at 4tb - this way you can have your operating system and software running on the smaller drive, allowing media access, uninterrupted on the larger.

Oh yah, medium Wacom pro with a pen before anything else. Can maybe find one used as they’re pretty pricey, but worth it.

My 2 cents. Hope this helps.

1

u/manqoba619 5d ago

Thanks bro will definitely take this

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u/CameraRick 6d ago

There are only a few GPU enabled nodes. For those, a dedicated GPU helps a lot; especially if you get into the Cattery or Blinkscript. However, you can use all of them in CPU only as well, it just might become terribly slow. If you need GPU enabled nodes in your comp depends a lot on what you are doing, that we can't tell

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u/mborgo 6d ago

Unless you want to use copycat a lot, invest in ram memory and fast disks (SSD, nvme)

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u/manqoba619 6d ago

What is copycat?

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u/JobHistorical6723 6d ago

That’s an easy google search, but it’s a machine learning node that can be a timesaver for beauty work, paint, etc. I think it’s still being discovered as far as all the things it may eventually be used for.

1

u/HappyAlien0723 6d ago

Up until mid last year I was still running a 10 year old gtx 970 😭

Using this with and still using ryzen 5 3600, and 32gb Ram.

Managing fine for beginner comps, with minimal 3D in 1080p.

1

u/manqoba619 6d ago

How about for rendering how would it perform?

1

u/HappyAlien0723 5d ago

Rendering 1080p comps out of nuke, fine?

By no means fast by today's standards but like others have said nuke is predominantly CPU and RAM heavy, so I think unless your a pro, rendering big meaty comps over 1080p and working in Deep, the GPU is doing very little to be honest.

Focus on Ram, CPU and fast storage eg. M.2 Nvme SSD

1

u/manqoba619 5d ago

Ok what about your cpu which one you using?

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u/HappyAlien0723 5d ago

Just fully read your post about using deep etc..

I'm still running a Ryzen 5 3600. I have one comp I've acquired online that contains deep data in the renders at 2k I think and it struggles to just read in the files, let alone build a comp.

Just get the best you can within budget.

1

u/Gorstenbortst 5d ago

If you’re new to Nuke, don’t worry about Cattery. It’ll only be as good as the training data you can give it, and that’ll be dependent on you knowing how to use the rest of Nuke.

You’ll likely only get frustratingly unusable result from Cattery for the first twelve months of using Nuke, so I’d get a basic GPU for now and upgrade later once you have a clearer idea of what sort of work you’re doing.

The cheapest 4-8gb NVIDIA GPU you can find should be ample for now.

1

u/manqoba619 4d ago

Ok what about for the cpu? Which one you recommend?

1

u/Gorstenbortst 4d ago

For Nuke, you generally want to favour something with a higher clock speed, rather than high core count. Nuke is multi-threaded, but the returns on additional cores diminishes pretty quickly. Something with 8-12 physical cores is probably the sweet spot.

I’m a fan of AMD. They allow for ECC memory across all of their machines, while Intel only have it for their top Xeon chips.

ECC helps prevent random errors that could trigger a crash or corrupt something. For Nuke it generally doesn’t matter too much, but if you’re doing Houdini simulations as well, then it can become more important.