Graphics card advice, please

[Davers]

Hi All,

I'm thinking about upgrading my PC's graphics card but am getting a little lost with so many different versions of the SAME card

My current card is a GTX 980Ti and I want to upgrade it to an RTX 2060 Super, but which one do I go for? There are double fans, triple fans, Founders edition, Windforce, water-cooled and they all seem to have different GPU clock speeds. It's so confusing to someone like myself!

My primary use for the PC is work. I use 3DS Max & VRay for 3D and the Adobe suite for comp/FX work. I'm not planning on adding a second card and I have little to no interest in gaming but do use an Oculus Rift for VR work.

Here are some of my PC's specs, if that helps:

• Asus Z170 Pro Gaming motherboard
• Cooler Master V750 750W PSU
• Intel Core i7 6700k Skylake processor 4.00GHZ - (Yeah, I know. I didn't realise this was a poor choice for 3D rendering when I bought the PC)

I hope the above is enough info to go on. I just want to know what would suffice for GPU rendering.

Thanks for your time and hope to hear back from someone more knowledgable than me

Thanks,

Andy

[Muhammed_Hamed]

Hi Andy

I like MSI personally, check out MSI Gaming X.. It is not expensive, and offers very good cooling and comes with higher clocks out of box
But this doesn't matter much honestly, if you find a good deal on EVGA or say Gigabyte cards.. go for it. They are nearly as good.
Founders Edition cards are quite good as well, but they are usually more expensive. Hybrid cards are nice but there is no need for them.. you will only have one card for Renering and as far as I know there are no hybrid 2060 Super
You can keep the 980Ti to use for monitors/viewport performance and keep the 2060 Super for your GPU rendering.

Best,
Muhammed

[hermit.crab]

You can check this article in our knowledge base for some guidelines.

[Davers]

Hi Andy

I like MSI personally, check out MSI Gaming X.. It is not expensive, and offers very good cooling and comes with higher clocks out of box
But this doesn't matter much honestly if you find a good deal on EVGA or say Gigabyte cards.. go for it. They are nearly as good.
Founders Edition cards are quite good as well, but they are usually more expensive. Hybrid cards are nice but there is no need for them.. you will only have one card for Rendering and as far as I know, there are no hybrid 2060 Super
You can keep the 980Ti to use for monitors/viewport performance and keep the 2060 Super for your GPU rendering.

Best,
Muhammed

Thanks for the tips, Muhammed. I'll check out the MSI Gaming X one.

I did initially think about keeping the 980 Ti but it's a big old card (says it's a Gigabyte Windforce on the side) and doesn't leave any space to add a second card. I don't even know if there is a slot to add a second card on the motherboard. If there is, the 980 is covering it anyway

Thanks also for the link, Aleksandar. For a non-techie like myself, it's difficult to know whether my now 5-year-old PC is even capable of handling more up to date components.

Thanks both again & all the best,

Andy

[fixeighted]

I bought a 2080ti and also have a 980ti so was looking to do the same thing. Sadly I discovered that the chip I got outpaced the rtx and the 980 combined and using the cpu PLUS the cards had no benefit whatsoever - was actually slower.
This tech juggling game is a total nightmare - so I really do hope you get lucky and the card is faster than your chip in this case
Luckily I'm a gamer, so no bad came from the purchase, just disappointed that I can't benefit from gpu render speeds.

[francomanko]

what chip outpaced the rtx?

[fixeighted]

AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Sixteen Core 4.7GHz

[Muhammed_Hamed]

fixeighted

your 2080ti should be faster in RTX mode,
In Vray Benchmark it is about 30% faster than your CPU(Cuda benchmark)
Disable your CPU, and disable your 980ti for rendering(keep this card for monitors)
Using all 3 in Cuda is not recommended, the CPU and 980ti are gonna be slower than the RTX card alone

[fixeighted]

Yeah I did try all the combinations but saw only a decrease in speed. I will try again today and post findings. Thanks for mentioning that benchmark result - at least that gives hope that maybe I have something wrongly set up.

[Muhammed_Hamed]

Let me know how this goes!
Another issue is that the 980ti cannot use the new studio drivers, it can only use game ready drivers(try this next, if it is still slower).. You could run the Cuda benchmark as well.. to make sure they cards are scoring as they should

[fixeighted]

Well although I thought I had already installed the driver I had to do it again. The only studio driver available now is 442.92 which is supposed to work, however it does not.
I get an error saying 442.54 (now not available) or above is needed, so clearly a conflict. I'll post separately about this.
CUDA seems fine.

[Davers]

Just wanted to say thanks again, Muhammed_Hamed for the advice. I now have an MSI Gaming X 2060 Super installed and it's great! Much smaller and quieter than my tripled-fan 980TI. Shame I couldn't keep that but there's just no room for two cards with it installed.

[Joelaff]

The thread rippers (Cuda cpu plus the 2080Ti) outpace RTX in all my tests.

For most scenes capable of rendering in the GPU using CUDA is definitely faster than CPU as well. It’s all quite scene dependent, though.

[francomanko]

bit confused by that....do you mean Threadripper cpu with the cuda 2080ti in Hybrid mode, beats RTX on a single 2080ti?

[Joelaff]

bit confused by that....do you mean Threadripper cpu with the cuda 2080ti in Hybrid mode, beats RTX on a single 2080ti?

Yes. Since RTX cannot use the CPU as well the combination of the GPU in CUDA and the CPU is faster. Of course with more video cards it may not be. I don't recall exactly how much faster, but I think was a little less than twice as fast. So two 2080Tis in RTX might be faster, but of course then the CUDA gets a little faster too So not sure where the tradeoff is.