Upcoming Pascal cards GTX 1080 vs GTX 980 Ti

[infotech]

Announcement has been made that the upcoming GTX 1080 Pascal card is stated to be 2x in (VR) performance compared to GTX Titan X ... @ 3x the power efficiency.

http://www.theverge.com/circuitbreak...e-release-date


CUDA core count for the GTX 1080 is lower though ... compared to the GTX 980 Ti ... (2816 vs 2560 respectively).

http://www.overclock3d.net/articles/...s_comparison/1


Any thoughts if it would still be worthwhile to get the GTX 980 Ti for use with VRay RT (due to higher CUDA core count) ... and take advantage of any clearance sales occurring right now? Or wait for the GTX 1080?

Don't want to make the same mistake again of giving up my GTX 700 series Kepler cards for Maxwell ... where VRay RT initially under performed.

Thanks!

[Moriah]

Wait for benchmarks and decide for yourself then... Should come up everywhere in the coming weeks. That's what im doing.

[vlado]

I would also wait for those benchmarks. It is a bit weird as nVidia has been very open about the performance of their cards so far, but there is nothing yet on the 1000 series yet. This could ether be a good thing, or a bad thing... There are some rumours that put the performance of the cards at the same level as the Titan X, but they are not reliable.

We have not had a chance to test them yet either so we don't know if tweaks to our code will be required.

Best regards,
Vlado

[Sbrusse]

Yeah I would wait for those bench as well.
Thing is, marketing can be tricky because for video games, two cards in SLI DOES NOT perform as twice the speed, and that highly depends on how drivers have been optimized for that specific game as well.
If it was as fast as two time the 980 Ti, they would just have said so, but they specifically specified that it was the speed of two 980Ti in SLI

Don't take me wrong, I'm sure they are great cards and will make GPU rendering easier and more affordable, but I won't throw my Titan X rig soon I think

Stan

[cheerioboy]

Yeah too early to tell yet. I'm almost ready to purchase a second VR capable, portable rig. I'll most likely get another 980ti for that and then wait for the 1080ti card. At which point I can SLI the two 980ti's and put the 1080ti in my porta rig. If it'll fit.

[Sbrusse]

If you can, wait straight for the 1080 as RV with SLI, is that even possible?

[Neilg]

We just priced out a full suite of new machines for june, so this is perfect timing. going to hold on for benchmarks (and compare to 9xx series price drops) and take full advantage of the timing.

[infotech]

Thanks everyone. We've decided to wait for the reviews of the Pascal cards as well. Its good timing that we are spec'ing out our render workstation upgrades as well.

Its unbelievable that getting 12 core CPU's are reasonable now (price-wise). This should tide us over until the Pascal cards are fully supported for RT.

[benb32]

Shouldn't have to wait too long for the reviews, the cards are already out with reviewers - they have had to sign NDAs not to publish results until late sometime today.

[benb32]

Still guessing that SLI configs won't be the best fit for a vray RT system. But a straight system just for VR might work better using just directx 12, which can utilise all your cards (including amd ones) separately. The devil will be in the detail with each VR company using its own methods - whether to take advantage of directx 12 or use a driver setup based on SLI.

[Paul Oblomov]

I might have a chance to run benchmark scene on 1080. With a small help, from chaos guys Hopefully...

[Sbrusse]

Dont want to be rude, but if you have a chance to run octanebench at the same time, that would be awesome

[vlado]

Dont want to be rude, but if you have a chance to run octanebench at the same time, that would be awesome

Aw, I'm sure someone on the Octane forum will do that at some point.

I'm told that we can get a card here in the office in the beginning of June, but we'll see... if Paul manages to test sooner that would be great.

Best regards,
Vlado

[Paul Oblomov]

Card just flew away the day before Sadly Tryig to find where it is now.

[Nicinus]

Did anyone come to a conclusion on this?

I'm considering getting dual 1080s for a new system, but I'm not sure how it will work in practice. I would like to benefit from the full performance when running 3ds Max and Unreal, but RT does not support SLI, right? Is there a way to disable SLI in software?

One of the reasons I want two cards is to have viewport performance while running RT, but it seems like a waste to not use the second 1080 for RT as well. I've read threads where some people have multiple Titans to run RT, but do they sacrifice one card or live with the sluggishness? I know I can lower Ray Bundle Size and RPP, but what is the common approach? It would seem to me that having a cheaper and smaller video card would make sense while running RT, but then these cards would be left unused for everything else.

Dream scenario would be to have two (or more) high performance cards in SLI, and one $2-300 card as support that was activated only when running Vray RT, switching over the big guns to RT. Future possibility?