Best Used GPU for Rendering 3D and Video

[jiw2003]

So i'm putting a work station together and my plan is to build on the Ryzen 1700.

The rig is designed for content creation and whilst video is part of my plan i'm far more interested in creating 3D content.

My plan was to use two GTX 780 Ti in SLI. Each card has 2,880 Cuda cores so in SLI i'll have 5,760 but still have just 3GB vram. The combined price of both cards was £250.

I could opt for a single GTX 980 Ti which has just 2,816 cores but is over 30% faster in benchmarks than a single 780 Ti and has 6gb vram. A single card would cost £250 used.

Finally, now that the 1080 Ti has been released you can find the standard 1080 for just £320, used, on eBay. This has just 2,560 Cuda cores; the least of them all. However it does have 8gb vram and in gaming out performs the 980 Ti by 30%. However i understand in Adobe premier it's no better than the 980 Ti.

So the question is which is the better setup for 3D rendering, watts aside? 2x 780 Ti, a single 980 Ti, or a single 1080?

Anybody with experience in this area i would value your opinions. Thanks

[flearider]

wait for vega .. a month at the most .. will prb work better with the 1700 (which I hope is oc.. with 3200 mem )

[jiw2003]

Unfortunately 3D render engines like nVidia and Cuda Cores and a new Vega will be more expensive than a used 1080

[EndlessWaves]

I don't think SLI works like that does it? I thought it was purely a gaming feature and other multi-card uses didn't use it.

The three cards you've mentioned are all from different generations so the core counts wouldn't be comparable even if they were running at the same clock speed.

I would look into benchmarks for the applications you use most. I guess by 3D rendering you're talking about visual stuff (Maya et al.) rather than Autocad, Solidworks or something else?

[jiw2003]

@EndlessWaves - SLI does work the way i'v e described. You do get a doubling of the Cuda cores but you don't double up the VRAM. So if both cards have 3Gb. then 3GB is all you get.

SLI in gaming gives you 150% with two cards rather than 200%. With each additional card it adds half again. So three cards would be like 100 + 50 +25 for 175% more performance.

Also with SLI in gaming nVidia have dropped support for SLI with more than two cards. Typically it makes more sense to buy the latest card than to fit two older card

As for 3D rendering it's not so much a specific 3D package but which rendering engine you use. For example in DAZ 3D i can use my nVidia GPU and CPU together to render a scene. With a Radeon card i could only use the CPU.

And i agree that newer cards can have fewer, but more efficient cores, than there older counterparts. But how this relates to 'better' depends on the software.

Like i said, the GTX 1080 is about 30% better in games than the 980 Ti. But with Adobe Premiere they both encode videos at the same length of time.

[Ttaskmaster]

Isn't this the sort of stuff Titans are supposed to be good at?
Fair few Titan Maxwells around and even some Pascals going cheap, most with waterblocks included, in light of the released Titan XP...

[scaryjim]

@EndlessWaves - SLI does work the way i'v e described. ...

In terms of technical resources it can work like that, and that's how it works for games, but for productivity it's not so straight-forward. Some productivity programs won't use the second card at all, regardless of your setup. Some won't recognise the second card if they're linked in SLI, but will if you disable SLI - in this case with SLI turned off it'll use both cards fully so it'll get twice the cores and twice the RAM. And some programs will utilise the SLI setup as you describe.

Historically I think the best support was for running two cards with SLI disabled, but it depends a lot on your software. Your best option is to check each software package for what configurations it supports. I suspect of the options you listed 2x 780 Ti might be the best option, but it does depend on the software...

[kompukare]

Isn't this the sort of stuff Titans were supposed to be good at?

There fixed that for you. As in only the first two Titans (Titan and Titan Black) which were based on GK110 had extra features in that they didn't disable the DP performance versus GTX780/GTX780Ti. Whereas big Maxwell (GM200) and Pascal (GP102 not big Pascal) were not designed to have much DP.

Of course, this all doesn't matter if these 3D rendering tasks do not use DP. Which is the problem with a question like in the OP. Without looking at application-specific (and possibly even scene-specific) benchmarks it is impossible to answer these kind of questions. Certainly for Adobe stuff* I have seen GTX750 doing was well as GTX780 etc. And that's before be go into OpenCL vs CUDA etc.
*something like Photoshop could be even tricker once third-party filters come into it because then it is does the filter support multiple CPU threads, work with OpenCL or CUDA, scale with how many GPU cores, etc.

[jiw2003]

@scraryjim & @kompukare - I agree that specific tools for specific applications will always yield the best results. However my original question was deliberately broad as i want the best card/s combination for the majority of tasks. In the same way a painter wants all the colours of the rainbow so they can paint any picture; whether landscapes or portraits.

Ultimately the packages i would be looking at are 3DS Max, Blender, Daz3D and Reallusion iClone. But the software isn't the only point but also which renderer you use to render the scene. For example Blender has at least 6 render engines you can use. Including Cycles, LuxRender, Maxwell, Mitsuba, Octane, and V-Ray. All producing slightly different results and taking a different amount of time to render the scene.

https://www.blenderguru.com/articles...les-vs-giants/

I'm also looking at Bang-for-the-buck. Sure it would be best to get a Titan Xp (Pascal), heck why not two. But for a pair i'm looking at £2,400. Currently i'm not good enough to harness that power. So £2,400 would be wasted on me. By the time i'm creating complex scenes it's very likely the next latest and greatest card will be out.

So for around the £300 mark is it better to get 2x 780 Ti, a Single 980 Ti, or a single 1080? My instinct is more, rather than faster individual, cores. In my mind rendering a scene is like a shotgun blast with lots of pellets, rather than a high velocity rifle.

Like this example of a CPU versus a GPU: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-P28LKWTzrI