GPU Vram Question. Should I wait for the new RTX-Series?

shimmytoxger

Hi I hope this is the right place to post this,

I  read that the current volta architecture uses something called vram pooling, so it can add the vram of other volta gpus like 8+8=16gb.
So I was wondering if the upcoming rtx series will do that too.
I want to buy a new gpu (currently gtx 1080) but I am not sure if I should wait for the new series or not.
I sometimes have heavy scenes where my single gtx1080 doesn't have enough vram so it dumps it on my cpu.

Or should I get another 1080? But I will still have only 8gb vram, right?
 

Thanks in advance
-Alex

ebergerly

Presently it's somewhere between unclear and unlikely that the 2080 and 2080ti will have VRAM stacking, but it's almost certain that you won't be able to stack the VRAM in your existing 1080 with any of the RTX cards. So you'd have to toss the 1080 and buy two very expensive RTX cards if it's really that important. 

I guess it depends on how much you're willing to spend and how much you need more VRAM. You could buy a 1080ti for about $650 and get 11GB of VRAM. Maybe just add that with your 1080 and when you're working on small scenes they'll both participate, and if you overload the 1080 then just the 1080ti will render. But you'll get more VRAM and faster renders. 

I've got a 1080ti with a 1070 and it works fine.  

GLE

Things like memory stacking are usually server-only features. ebergerly has the high ground on the matter, so I'll add side considerations.

The consumer proxy of mem stack was TurboCache, a technology nVidia used more than 10 uears ago (low end GF 6000 series) that allowed the GPU to reserve regular RAM for its workloads. The implementation was pretty nice, with dynamic RAM allocation up to the same amount installed on the card.

IDK why this feature was not reintroduced for Iray: while onboard GPU memory will always be the fastest option, falling back to CPU is slower than shunting data to and from RAM, especially on DDR4 systems.

If you're a business, you should buy right now whatever is on the market - you can probably recover your investment in the 3 months before RTX cards are physically available, and you'll keep your customers happy in the meantime.

If you're a consumer, waiting for RTX preformance figures and for the GTX1000 series prices to drop might be a better move.

 

DrNewcenstein

Apparently Nvidia has beta testers under a gag order regarding whether the RTX cards will have memory pooling through the NVLink/SLI bridge :(

My money says they won't, because they are under the impression that simply telling someone to buy a Quadro that has that feature makes money you don't have suddenly appear out of thin air.