Hi folks, I'm deliberating over purchasing 4090 for work. I do mainly 3d modeling and texturing, with some texture baking as well (Marmoset, Mari, Substance painter). I'm also proficient with rendering, but it's not the main focus for me in the last years. Right now I have rtx 3060 12 gb, which isn't bad, but It seems quite slow on caching in Substance Painter with many materials. Though I'm not quite sure if it will be sped up with a more powerful GPU. 3060 was the only viable option in 2022 due to bloated mining prices, and I live in Ukraine. I don't have any hands-on experience with either 3090 or 4090 for work, so I'm curious if anyone could share their experience. As I'm sure many people owned 1080ti, which is quite similar to 3060, except it didn't have rtx cores. So do you think it's a good purchase for modeling and texturing tasks, compared to 3060? Or it's sufficient to buy used 3090 for 1/3-th the price? I also have some post-mining era trauma, that I feel that prices might skyrocket again at any moment. Or am I delusional? Is there such a possibility, also with umcoming AI? The prices seem have stabilized now, so 4090 is around 2k, which is a lot, but for work seems fine, as it's a purchase for about 7 years.
Your RTX 3060 isn't bad, but if caching in Substance Painter is slow, an upgrade might help. A more powerful GPU can improve things, but check if other factors like CPU, RAM, or storage speed are causing slowdowns too. The 4090 is a beast, great for long-term use, but expensive. A used 3090 is still powerful and cheaper, so it's worth considering. Overall, AI developments won't make your GPU obsolete overnight. GPUs keep evolving, so yours should serve you well. So I wanna conclude if budget matters, a used 3090 is a solid option.
it all comes down to budget... i like what Diane said about a 3090 - which you can buy New Old Stock if you're nervous about crypto milage on a used model the 4090 as SOTA will obviously be the long term champ, but only if you can make enough money to mitigate the cost
I will preface by saying I've not used Substance Painter all my 3d painting has been in blender. Are you sure its the video card causing the choke, according to the adobe developers a 1TB SSD is recommend just for the shader caching unless you have a A100 your not going to be caching but a fraction of that at any given time in VRAM. If you pull up the performance overlay see something like 99% GPU usage then a CPU spike with a GPU drop then back up to 99% it might be another component causing the slow down.
I don't know much about rendering except it can be pretty big cpu and gpu taxing, but I would think the display resolution would factor in also. So you wouldn't really need a 4090 if you're working in 1440p a 4070 ti might still do what you need if you're looking to save a bit. Also a 4080 does 4k quite well with a 256 bit bus 16gb gddr6x and quite cheaper than a 4090.