Which graphics card is better for Source Filmmaker?

[coulef]

I am trying to understand what will make Source Filmmaker faster. I have a budget so I cannot buy something super-duper, I am trying to understand what is faster in sfm. Radeon RX 580 (4 gb), Gigabyte GTX 1060 (6 gb). Is it better for sfm if the graphics card has more memory or not (4gb 6g)?
Thank you for looking at this, have a nice day!

[Capt Fuzzy]

More video RAM is always a good thing, but as far as making SFM any faster, I don't think so...
SFM is a somewhat old, 32 bit program. No matter how much RAM your PC has, SFM will only use about 3.5GB of it, so adding more RAM will probably help with your games, but not in SFM.
I'd recommend the GTX 1060, personally...

[R234]

Well, obviously the "better" one performance-wise would be the strongest one, whichever it is (I'm not familiar with AMD GPUs). However, SFM runs on an aging 32-bit engine, so past a certain threshold you get massively diminishing returns. Also, VRAM doesn't matter so long as it has enough (and 4 gb is way more than enough for SFM). A fast CPU is actually more important than a strong GPU for SFM rendering.

I'd say the best thing to do would be to ignore SFM entirely. Base your choice on your needs for other applications, gaming, whatever. If SFM really is the most demanding app you intend to run, go for the cheapest one, it'll do just fine.

[coulef]

Thanks for the fast reply, I use sfm on my old computer (windows 8) and It's very slow.
I'm planning to make sfm videos and would like a faster graphics card.
I bought a tower with 16gb RAM an onboard graphics and sfm does not run on it.
I just need your opinion on what better graphics are there.
Thank you very much.

[coulef]

What graphics card do you use to render your videos and/create them?
p.s I watch your videos.

[Marco Skoll]

For SFM, there will be no meaningful difference between those cards, and unless your current card is grossly obsolete, upgrading it at all is probably a waste of money. (That's not to say that the differences won't be significant for other graphics intensive applications, but just not SFM).

The most demanding parts of SFM are very CPU heavy, so for any broadly matched CPU/GPU pair, the cause of slow render rates is almost never the GPU (which is usually waiting for the CPU to tell it what to render).

I once tested this by re-rendering a scene after I had upgraded my graphics card from an HD 7570 to a GTX 750 Ti. In many games, that meant double the performance. In SFM, it made less than 2% difference, because the CPU was still bottlenecking the GPU.

TL;DR: Do not use SFM as an excuse to buy a new graphics card.

~~~~~

EDIT: If you've only got onboard graphics, then you will need a dedicated graphics card to run SFM. However, choose what you want based on how it will work in other games, not how it will work in SFM.

[episoder]

if i'd have to guess the 1060 is faster in dx9.

[R234]

Originally posted by Anonymous Pika:

What graphics card do you use to render your videos and/create them?
p.s I watch your videos.

Oh, if you mean me, it's a GTX 770. It's showing its age as far as new games go, but for SFM it does the job perfectly.

[Zappy]

Personally, I use an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 or something. But as others have said, for Source FilmMaker, the GPU doesn't matter much as long as it's decent, but the CPU definitely will. It also works pretty well for gaming in something like the 2016 version of Doom at very nice quality (though as I only have 4 gigabytes of VRAM, I can't enable the very highest quality settings, but I get close).

Either way, it might be a good idea if you mention which CPU you have. The exact name can be found if you hit the Windows key, search for and open "dxdiag", then look at "Processor" in the "System Information" part.
For example, it says I have an Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-4690K CPU @ 3.50GHz (4 CPUs), ~3.5GHz. And again, I have great performance in both Source FilmMaker and "modern" games. And I got my computer almost a year ago, I believe, so the prices for those probably-pretty-good things have likely fallen since then.

...But I'm not much of a "tech" person, so it's better to listen to people other than me as for what you should buy. These are just my experiences with my stuff.

[episoder]

i'm not a tech person either, but i can read numbers. you can have two different type of scenes.

https://www.techpowerup.com/gpudb/2938/radeon-rx-580

more tmus, more memory bandwidth. more tflops.

means... heavy lit, shaders and materials. more or less fancy town.
_________________________________

https://www.techpowerup.com/gpudb/2862/geforce-gtx-1060-6-gb

more rops. higher pixel output. and it's known to have a good cache.

means... when textures are packed and/or it's simpler lit, you can have a lot more of stuff. for example foliage, that may be overlapping and using cheap alphatesting, and/but depending how fast the alphablending is, this means faster particle and smoke thingie rendering too. it's more or less outdoors.

pixel output generally also improves the possible output resolution and/or fps.

in sfm particle computation depends on the cpu tho, that's a limiter, but atleast they render fast.

[Krinkov]

Either one of those GPUs will work perfectly fine since SFM and source powered games and software are usually much more CPU dependent. When I upgraded from a GTX 650 to an RX 480 there really wasn't much of a difference in comparison to the huge performance boost I got from upgrading my CPU.

[Pipann]

Wouldn't installing Steam/SFM on an SSD make things faster as well?

That is, if you're planning on using an SSD. I use a 500 gig one for my OS and some of the key programs (photoshop, max) I use while making sure not to fill the drive too much. I'm no expert and could be looking through pink shades but the difference felt very significant to me.

[coulef]

Interestingly enough sfm runs for some wacky reason, whenever i start SFM it always makes the window "Unsupported graphics card". However when i close that window and load a map and models, it works just fine except for a strange white diagonal line. It also says something about requiring "DirectX 9.0 Shader model 3.0", Does anyone know how to fix this?
Thank you all.
@Zappy I ran that command that you suggested and these are the results:
System model Z270-Gaming K3
Processor Intel(R) Core(TM)I7-7700 CPU @ 3.60GHz
DirectX version:DirectX 12
Hope this helps @Zappy.

[Marco Skoll]

Originally posted by Anonymous Pika:

Does anyone know how to fix this?

The only fix is to get a supported graphics card*. SFM cannot use several of its features on integrated graphics.

* However, as I say above, SFM is very CPU dependent. While neither of the graphics cards you mentioned before are top of the line, they'll more than match the CPU for SFM. (But that CPU is ideal, with very strong single-core performance).

[coulef]

I got the graphics card everyone, tysm for the help. It runs amazingly well, thank you all.