Best Card configuration for viewport and RT

[danb4026]

2 parts:


1). What is the BEST (regardless of price) configuration for optimum viewport performance and optimum RT performance available today?

2) What is the best VALUE for the same?

[Donald2B]

1 - Quadro K6000 with 12GB Memory
2 - Little more difficult. For me with very large data sets Quadro K5000 is my value/performance leader. For others it is a GTX 680.

I haven't tried a Titan or a GTX780 but would assume that they would perform well.

[danb4026]

Thanks for your input Donald. I have heard talk of people using more than one card...one for better viewport performance and a 2nd for RT rendering. Seems to me that this would provide a more optimal configuration. I just would not which cards to look at.

[Donald2B]

What kind of work are you trying to do?

I can't tell you what card is good or bad without know how/what you need them to do. If you work with large datasets you need the video card with the most amount of RAM possible. So buy the highest RAM card you can afford.

Using multiple cards will help, but doesn't spread the scene across all cards. So if you have 3 GPUs with each having 2GB RAM, you still only have 2GB ram total since each card needs to load the entire scene.

Another thing to consider about multiple cards is that if you don't go with a nVidia Tesla card, you will need to have a monitor connected to that card to initialize properly or some type of cheater plug. There are many posts by vlado in the RT section regarding this issue.

[JezUK]

Sorry for jumping in here.... but I'd like to know the answer to this GPU question as well.

I do what I'd call typical Visualisation work (Interior Design Office Interiors, Reception areas, residential kitchens etc, and Exteriors of houses, small buildings (eg. hotels etc)) - can't remember exactly how many polygons but someone around the 10million polys would be my maximum.

I don't have an unlimited budget, but am looking at either a Quadro 4000, a Titan, or a GTX680 card ??

I'm upgrading my machine from being a 4 year old i7 940 with an oldish Quadro 2000, to most likely a 3930K processor, 32gb ram.....

This single GPU card is to give me the best possible experience with RT and viewport performance as currently the performance I'm getting in RT is very low with my current setup !

PS must work well in Adobe Premiere, AE, Photoshop etc.

[joconnell]

On a quadro 4000 here and it sucks!

[Donald2B]

I would agree with joconnell on this one. Quadro 4000 is quite old when compared to current game cards. You would need to get into the K series of Quadro cards to get any decent performance.

But for the most part, those are pretty light scenes and and decent game card should do just fine. You are looking to get as much GPU RAM as possible and then check out the number of CUDA cores.

I haven't tested any of these cards personally, but going to past experience my recommendation would be the following: GTX 770 with 4GB Ram.

Maybe someone with a Titan can chime in, but you are paying almost double over the GTX770, but if you need the additional 2GB of RAM it may be worth it to you. My Quadro K5000 is performing MUCH better than my GTX680 in both viewport and RT GPU performance, but that is just the nature of the work that I typically have to do, with LOTS of engineering models.

[JezUK]

Sorry guys, I should have been more exact - I meant the Quadro K4000.

I'd really love to have much better performance than I currently do - for example, I forgot to mention that I was recently tasked with doing some renderings of a new range of cars, was loving the VRayCarPaint material, but it took my a VERY long time to get flakesizes/scales etc exactly as I liked them - but watching others demonstrate on YouTube doing the same using good equipment and VRayRT I believe I could have achieved the same results in minutes.....

[Donald2B]

I think my advice still holds true. For GPU RT, your main concerns are getting as much GPU RAM as possible and lots of cuda cores. So if you can get your biggest file into the 4GB limit of the GTX770, you should be good to go. If you need more than 4GB you have to look into a Titan which has 6GB.

I would NOT recommend a Quadro K4000 for anyone trying to do RT GPU rendering due to it's small 3GB memory. The Titan will be cheaper and probably perform better in this situation.

I love my Quadro K5000 because of viewport performance with large engineering data sets within Max. It works great with RT GPU when I need it to, but it's NOT the reason I have this particular card.

[JezUK]

Thanks Troy for your advice.

Please can I ask - how can you calculate / tell if my file will fit into this 4gb limit ?

PS - saw your wonderful work on your website - fantastic stuff

[Donald2B]

I use some desktop gadgets to help show me what's going on under the hood. I know that there are much better apps out there, but these give me all the information I need in a quick glance.



As for my work. Thanks!

The website is quite old now, with most projects being pretty outdated. Most of my recent work (4-5 years) is still heavily tied up in NDAs. So it makes it hard to showcase newer work. It sucks, but that's the way it goes. I'm sure others here can relate to that.

[windrockwater]

I went from a Nvidia 580 video card that was supposed to be comparable to a quadro to a Quadro 5000 (not the current 5000). The Geforce card was 500$ at that time and the Quadro was $1500. So i was crossing my fingers!

It was night and day in the viewport performance for me for architectural renderings. I will not go back to a non-quadro unless newer non-quadros are alot better (which i doubt they are). I went from hating large models to being able to fly around the model with more assets actually being visible!

[JezUK]

Troy, following your advice (and windrockwater) I think I'm going to stick with a Quadro card - I've been taking a look online and with a bit of luck, might be able to get a K5000 for just a little more than the price of a Titan, so I'd rather go for the Quadro....

Many thanks for all your input - it's going into an upgrade....

Here's my spec....

Asus P9X79 WS (normally I use Supermicro boards, but I have to bite this OC bullet someday, despite my reservations re. reliability.....)
i7-3930K 3.2Ghz (been told enough times that this is the 'standard', best value etc processor to go for)
32GB ram (don't know what make - does the make truly make a difference ? Usually I've bought Crucial memory) - will only half-fill available slots,
Quadro K5000 (I think this will give me very good future proofing and should prove a good long term investment)

All other bits from the current machine including a 256Gb Crucial M4 SSD, 1000w Enermax PSU, Noctua NH-D1402911 Heatsink, 4Tb HDDs etc etc.

[JezUK]

Thanks Troy for all your advice...

I've now purchased a Quadro K5000 and it's installed and running on my 4year old i7 940 system....

The price of the card was less than half the £1850 quoted via the usual PC component channels (got mine for £895 off eBay).....

Great improvements are already being seen between it and my old Quadro 2000D..... (which it too is now on eBay !).

I'm thinking of holding off of my new build until the next new processors coming from Intel (Ivy-Bridge ?) are well established.

That new generation should herald a new set of Motherboards which will support PCI-3.0, and I'm sure this card would benefit from all of that.

Thanks for all your guidance.

[Donald2B]

Great! I'm glad it's working out for you.

I'm very happy with mine!