30 series RTX cards - is it worth it for me?

[ripe]

Really would like some input on this - not a great deal online / youtube really - but i'd like to know if a 30 series card will be a good investment for Vray GPU given my current setup.

I have an Intel 5960X and 2x Nvidia 1070 GPU's - so when rendering with Cuda and GPU rendering engine I get my CPU and both GPU's working flat out - it's decent and pretty quick.

I tried a 3060TI we have for a gaming machine for my Son - with either RTX or Cuda chosen - the speed was very similar from the one card to my entire rig (2x 1070 and CPU)

So I need to jump to 3070 or above to gain anything?

Anyone moved from 10 or 20 series cards (multi card setup) and seen good gains with just one 30 series card?

My other option is build a Threadripper PC and put in 3x1070's as I have a few 1070 cards!

Appreciate any input

[patrick_anderson]

I recently had a pc built for me. I opted for a Ryzen 7 5800 but went with a rtx3090. My thinking was a majority of my work will easily fit on a 24gb card. I was under the impression that a heavy scene causes bottlenecks if the card can't hold everything. I could well be wrong about that though.

[Yard2380]

Not yet, but I plan to jump from the current 1080ti x3 setup to a 2 or 3 3090rtx setup IF I can get the cards.... (need blower editions) I believe this would decrease render times by at least a factor of 4 and make sure I can fit scenes on the cards that I can currently not.
At the moment it annoys me if I have to go back to CPU only rendering. (What I'm doing right now....!) It's so much slower. (about 5 times slower in my case.)

Either way it depends on the use case, if you do jewelry or a living room you can probably just add a 1070 and be done. If you do things that require more memory or raw render power...it becomes a question of time vs budget. In 2021 that means you need a rather hefty budget..doh!

Good luck!

[patrick_anderson]

I think my box was just over 4k with the 3090. There was lot of back and forths tweaking things. I have a fractal case that is excellent and I have the room to add another 3090 but I haven't had anything happen so far as to consider that. If you have a scene that need more than 24gb of vram, does it split it between the cards efficiently?

[Yard2380]

I think my box was just over 4k with the 3090. There was lot of back and forths tweaking things. I have a fractal case that is excellent and I have the room to add another 3090 but I haven't had anything happen so far as to consider that. If you have a scene that need more than 24gb of vram, does it split it between the cards efficiently?

I believe memory pooling(?) is not an option for the 3090 (or 30 series), so everything needs to fit within the ram of 1 card.

[piotrus3333]

check VRay benchmark scores to get an idea of what 3080 or 3090 can offer (just look at the middle of the list as top scores are heavily overclocked)
3090 is a nice card even for the money you need to pay now. 3080 with 8 gigs of ram is not worth it imo.
keep one 1070 to run your displays and sell the other one - because of the demand for gpus you can probably get what you paid for it years ago.

[JezUK]

I had 3 x 1080ti's and was lucky to get a couple of 3090's before the prices went crazy.

When I did have 3 x 1080ti's, my computer would blue screen fairly often, enough to make working a frustrating affair (I've built many, many computers over the years and this current one as been my worst in blue-screening).....

When I'd use just the 1 x 1080ti it never blue-screened once.

So, when I went to a RTX 3090 FE, I found the performance to be the same as 3 x 1080ti, with the exception of course that I then had 24Gb on the card and the blue-screening stopped...

When I doubled my RTX 3090 to two, my Sage X299 doesn't seem to accept NVLink (which it apparently supports). So, what I'm saying, is be careful, you may be lucky and pick a couple of 3090's up, but you might not get NVLink to work (like I haven't been able to).

And with 2 x 3090's, I've not had any blue-screening either.....

Just my 0.0002 cents of experience worth...