GTX 970 vs RTX 2070 Super
Jason Galterio
Posts: 2,562
I know the title of this message seems like a no brainer, just looking for advice to see if I should make a jump...
My current Desktop has dual GTX 970s and an 850 watt power suppy. Recently these cards have begun to show their age.
I was thinking about switching to a single RTX 2070 Super, since that should be double the capability of the single 970.
The other option is the RTX 2080 Ti, only because investing in this would be a little bit more than what the cost of dual RTX 2070 Supers would be.
Anyone have any suggestions or experience?
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I literally just made an upgrade from a single 2gb GTX 960 to the RTX 2070 Super. I couldn't be happier.
I realize that there's a big difference between one 2GB GTX 960 and 2 GTX 970's, so, your mileage may vary.
But, from my experience, I went from:
- having nearly unbearable lag just while posing / positioning figures / items in complex scenes (multiple figures w/tons of morphs, lots of props),
to having a great response time while working within scenes
and
- taking 20 minutes to test render, to making test renders in 5-7 minutes
AND the test renders look phenomenal, not too far away in quality from what it was taking me 4-6 hours to final-render with the GTX 960.
For me, it was a giant leap for Daz-kind. Might not be so much of a giant leap for yourself, but, I don't hink you'll regret it. I was going to go for the RTX 2080, too, but, just the leap from GTX to RTX is great, the extra 500 or so cuda cores I don't think I would have noticed as much (as if I had went for the RTX 2080). Personally, though, I'm looking to upgrade again next year to an 11GB card to dual w/the RTX 2070 Super. So, I considered it saving some money for the bigger card down the line, going with the 2070 Super instead. If you're going to look at dual-cards again, at a later date, you might consider it that way, too.
No experience in those cards but in checking the specs vs the cost I decided recently I would be buying the RXT 2070 instead of the RTX 2080 TI this coming summer. The only thing that could change that is a realtime ray tracing enabled AMD GPU gos on sale or the upcoming nVidia Ampere GPUs compete on price while having potentially much better performance.
Thank you for the input... That's what I am hoping.
I don't really think I ever got the speed out of the dual cards that I was led to believe I would get. And now they are pretty long in the tooth so I need to make a change.
I am currently using a GTX 970 4 GB nvidia GPU, and today I purchase a new RTX2060 Super 8 GB and want to use both of them in my system the 970 for the monitors and the 2060 just for rendering in Daz Studio I am currently using driver 430.39 with my 970 ... will this same driver work wth the new card? Once I install the new card do I then need to reinstall the driver? I have never used 2 video cards in the same system so I am unsure about the drivers to use .
If DS works with that driver adding the 2060 shouldn't be a problem. You won't need to install a new driver.
@kenshaw011267 thank you so much for your help, I am installing the new card tonight ... hoping to see a big improvement over the 970!
My 2070 is on its way and I hope to install it tongiht as well. :)
What I am undecided on is if I should leave one of my old 970s in, but I don't think there would be any benefit to that to be perfectly honest.
The only benefit it would provide is if your monitor was plugged into that card, then all VRAM on the other cards would be open also if your scene was small enough to fit on that card still, then you would have that added into your rendering power.
No. Windows always reserves a video buffer on any consumer graphics card installed.
There could be a benefit with rendering on scenes small enough to fit on the 970 as both cards will do the render.
But... in the case that the scene didn't fit in the memory of the 970, I would be rendering slower than if I had just the 2070.
I know you can disable which card does the work in DS, but I am not sold that it works completely as intended.
I don't think the power supply hit is worth it, nor the headache of trying to determine if both cards should be used or just one for each render.
I will be designating only the new 2060 in daz studio so that will be the only card available for rendering, the other card will be for the 2 monitors I have connected.
From my understanding if the scene doesn't fit on the 970, it won't negatively impact the 2070, plus your computer won't be reserving VRAM off the 2070 giving you less room on it for DS
I remember hearing somewhere (and my memory is admittedly bad) that if the scene didn't fit in the 970, it would drop to the CPU. What I don't know if that means that DS will switch to using the 2070 only... or if the drop to CPU will block the 2070.
Either way, I just don't think the gain is worth it. The 970s haven't been able to keep up recently... and logic is telling me that if the horse is wounded, don't put it out to race.
How I would set up my computer (and soon my will be similar as I currently have a 970 and am looking at either a 2060 or 2070 as soon as I pay my card back down)
I would have the 970 plugged into the monitor. I don't know off-hand the exact number, but lets just say windows reserves 1 Gig of VRAM for the system. That means I still have the full 8 gig for the 2070 instead of only 7.
If my scene is only 2.5 Gigs, then both the 970 and the 2070 will process the scene each at full capacity.
If the scene drops off the 970 for some reason, DS will stop using it, but continue using the 2070 at it's full capacity.
This is a persistent misunderstanding, I think it gets corrected pretty reliably on the forum but it may still be knocking around in soem off-site guides. Iray treats each GPU separately so if one drops out for memory reasons any others, with more rendering, will keep working unless and until their limit is exceeded.
No. If it fits in the larger of the two cards it just renders on it. I have an 8Gb card and an 11Gb one. Scenes that don't fit on the 2070 render on just the 1080ti no problem.
Windows ALWAYS reserves VRAM on consumer grade cards.
Ahh, I thought it was only if a card had a monitor plugged into it... Been a long time since I've had multiple cards (2 gtx 460's about 8 or so years ago)
I got my new video card installed and it's working ... the renders are alot quicker but I am finding it dropping to CPU afte I've done a few test renders and that's only with a G8, outfit , hair and a light set. Also when I first start DS 4.12 beta and load my scene GPU-Z show I may be using approx 350 MB of ram which once I render goes upwards of 3000MB then when the render is done that amount of ram shows still being in use, is that normal? Also when I installed th video card it installed a new driver automatically, evrsion 432.00
iRay doesn't always release all the VRAM when a render finishes, this is even worse if you don't close the render preview window. So after several renders the card has no VRAM left and any further renders drop to CPU until you close DS and restart it.
See this table. We don't have any numbers for the 2070 SUPER yet, but the GTX 970 and vanilla 2070 are our two most recent updates. Based on the numbers there, I'd say that upgrading from your dual 970's is definitely worth it. Whether for a 2070 SUPER or even a 2080Ti, the iterations per hour per dollar difference makes even the priceyness of RTX a good deal.
PS: Mind adding a bench of your dual GTX 970s to the pile? Instructions are here.
I also upgraded from a GTX 970 to an RTX 2070. Obviously the performance is a lot better and it's double the memory so that's nice too. Many scenes will fit on both of course so you can run them together.
Sorry... I would have, if I saw this sooner. I've already pulled the cards out and moved on.
I had stopped using them for rendering about six months ago. I noticed a drastic decline in performance about a month before that. I'm not sure if it was due to hardware issues or changes in software. So any benchmarks I would have done now would have probably been flawed.
I did run the benchmark with my modified system and got these results:
2019-11-22 11:16:21.026 Finished Rendering
2019-11-22 11:16:21.068 Total Rendering Time: 5 minutes 1.95 seconds
2019-11-22 11:16:31.826 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Device statistics:
2019-11-22 11:16:31.826 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : CUDA device 0 (GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER): 1800 iterations, 6.677s init, 290.227s render
I will do a formal entry once I collect the rest of the data.
Too bad.
Was curious to see how two 970s match up against one.
It most likely would've been valid. Between Iray and constant Nvidia driver updates, there's been a lot of apparent (not actual) shifts in Iray rendering performance since before the debut of RTX. The biggest was going from DS 4.10 to 4.11. Nvidia made dozens of pages worth of updates to the embedded version of Iray in it at the time. Some of which (eg. integrating the specialized "architectural shading" mode into the standard rendering process) resulted in greater amounts of image data being resolved per iteration - but at the cost of iterations taking longer to complete (ie. little to no actual performance change.) You could see this by rendering a specific scene in 4.10 to a specific convergance % and then repeating in 4.11. The 4.11 render would always reach convergance over a significantly fewer number of iterations.