I have an RTX A6000 and since I have updated the GPU drivers to the latest NVIDIA RTX Enterprise Production Branch Driver R510 U1 (511.09), I have noticed a serious performance degradation (around 35% perf.).
After I have rolled back to the previous NVIDIA RTX Enterprise Production Branch Driver R470 U7 (472.84) the performance issue was gone.
From my knowledge the release 510 is the latest Production Branch release of the NVIDIA RTX Enterprise Driver, which provides improvements over the previous branch in the areas of application performance but not for Vantage…
I can’t reproduce the performance issue you are talking about.
I tested on an RTX 3080 and a Quadro A6000 GPU with various drivers including 466.xx, 471.xx and 511.09.
There is in fact around 7% speed up since driver 496.xx.
1. Can you tell us exactly which drivers you are comparing ?
2. Can you run the test again to make sure there is indeed a 35% slow down ?
You need to make sure all options are the same.
For example, enabling “clip opacity”, lights or increasing the number of ray bounces can easily lead to this kind of slow down.
3. If there is indeed a slow down in your tests, it might be scene dependent, so we need the scene to reproduce it here.
Sorry for the late reply, but I was very busy lately.
I have tested the drivers on my 3090 too and I have noticed the same performance drop.
The issue start to manifest when I render at very high resolutions (e.g. 8192x4320), I mean the renders takes longer to complete compared to 496.xx drivers.
Here I have uploaded a basic cruise ship scene where I have noticed the performance drop, also I have uploaded the config too for testing purpose.
Try to render that scene using my settings on both drives and see if you notice something about render time.
I have tested the scene on a RTX 8000 at 8k at 2000spp (there are a vrscene and hdr file that were not included in the linked scene and are not loaded in the tests below ) and here are the findings:
Initially I was with a 511 driver installed and rendered in 143.2001 sec.
switched to 496.49 and the scene rendered in 116.481 sec
switched back to 511 and this time it rendered in 114.75
I do not know why is there such a difference between the initial and the last render since they were both with the same driver and same settings (no PC restart in between).
I really don’t know what might be the cause, but I have tried several scenes with 511 drivers and all of them renders much slower, especially at higher resolutions (e.g 4320p).
On 472.84 everything is perfectly fine.
If you want I can provide you different basic scenes and test’em with the 511 drivers because I have a feeling that something’s not right with the 511 drivers.
As a side note 511 drivers have introduced geometric corruption and lower performance in video games too (e.g Far Cry 6).
If you want I can provide you different basic scenes and test’em with the 511 drivers
Yes, that would be helpful. Please also make sure to package all needed assets.
No need to apologize for a late reply, we’re all busy…aren’t we?
The quickest way to measure the the performance degradation is to launch the default scene and set the render resolution to 2160p (3840x2160 or 4096x2160) and wait 1-2 minutes.
I have attached two screenshots taken by me after waiting at least 2 mins on my both PCs one with the A6000 with the 472.84 driver and one with the RTX 3090 with the 511.65 driver, which clearly illustrate a downgrade.
In the mean time I will prepare 2-3 scenes from Archexteriors vol. 38 by Evermotion which includes fully textured exterior scenes of restaurants and cafes.
Again, I have noticed a serious perf. downgrade and frankly I really don’t know what might be the cause, but I have tried other several scenes with 511.65 drivers and all of them renders much slower, especially at higher resolutions (e.g 4320p).
The A6000 and the RTX 3090 are not the same GPU.
The A6000 has more CUDA/RT cores, but the RTX 3090 has faster memory.
Also, the temperature in each PC case can be affecting the performance by a lot.
You need to compare the drivers on the same machine, if you want a proper comparison.
Also, you mentioned a 35% slow down initially and the screen shots show only around 13% slow down.
As Vladimir said, it is best to compare on the same machine. Depending on the vendor of your 3090/cooling/PCIe bandwidth it can be slower or faster than an A6000
Even comparing 3090s with each other is a hard task, some will be 10%-15% faster out of box. The ones with massive coolers will be able to boost higher and will be faster. There are over 100 versions of 3090s in the market
In those screenshots which is the basic Vantage scene the down perf is around 13-14% but in more complex scenes the perf is down approx. to 30-35%.
The temps in my both PCs does not exceed 75-80 degrees C in render process.
I will install the R510 U2 (511.65) drivers on my A6000 machine and test again some scenes but I’m pretty sure the results will be the same.
But in the meantime test the scene I have uploaded on the 472.84 drivers then on 511.65, preferably on a Quadro VGA and a GeForce VGA and I’m sure you will notice the downgrade too.
My 3090 is FE edition, I don’t buy custom overclocked GPUs because they tend to be very unstable…
The reason why I tested the drivers on two different GPUs was to see if the issue might be driver related or GPU related. Like I’ve said, the downgrade manifests on both of my GPUs. If I roll back the performance goes back like it was.
You should average at least 3 runs as there is some small variation in the results. And more importantly lock the clock speeds. This can be done with nvidia-smi.exe for example. Alternatively at least let the GPU run at 100% for some time (e.g. Vantage rendering the viewport) until it reaches a stable max. temperature. Then start your test without giving it a rest to ensure each test is run at the same temperature.
That proves that the 511.65 drivers does not improve performance, on the contrary, multiple GPUs (rtx8000, a6000, rtx 3090 etc.) seems to suffer performance loss in Vantage.
Another friend of mine, with two A5000s noticed the same thing.
We are introducing A6000 series GPU in our ecosystem. Could you help us or guide us to what all we need to keep in mind before the purchases.? Speed vs Ram, cooling etc.. will be really helpful.
Would 2x A6000 increase memory to 96GB for use with Vantage.?
