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Nvidia Tesla P40

Pharos20Pharos20 Posts: 0
in The Commons

Hello!
I have doubts about whether this configuration for rendering would work.

When I use iray render many times my scene falls to the cpu, I thought that having more Vram could help.

My system already has a  RTX 3080  10GB card

Soon it will have an Nvidia Tesla P40 24GB

My questions are, 
Will both cards work together?
Which card did my scene fall on first?
Will there be improvements in rendering time?

I know I have to use an adapter to get the heat out of the P40

Any help I will appreciate

Comments

  • McGyverMcGyver Posts: 7,066

    I thought these GPUs weren't good for rendering?... and they are expensive too?  If I'm wrong, blame Reddit.

  • Pharos20Pharos20 Posts: 0

    Well, P40 is leftover from a friend's server.
    I currently use the 3080 for rendering, it's just that the memory fills up quickly...

  • outrider42outrider42 Posts: 3,679
    The P40 is Pascal based, and is the full GP102. So it has more cores than a 1080ti. However its clock speeds are significantly lower than most gaming models. Tesla cards have a secret weapon though, they run in TCC mode which dedicates all resources to the software, so Windows can't touch it.

    So in theory it should render around the 1080ti speed.

    But you have 2 issues. The first is combining a Tesla with a gaming card may have driver conflicts in the same system. I read it is possible but may require some tweaks to get working. The other issue is that mixing RTX and GTX might also pose a problem for Iray specifically. Now this is from my personal experience. When I got my 3090 and ran with a 1080ti, I got a lot of crashes when starting a render with both cards. Most of these were fatal errors dealing with memory. These crashes would happen even with very light scenes that were no where near the 1080ti VRAM limit. Not every time, but enough to really be annoying. When I got a 3060 to replace the 1080ti, those crashes completely stopped, even though the 3060 only has 1 extra gb of VRAM.

    I believe the problem is because non RTX cards have to emulate the ray tracing cores, and when using cards mixing them, you might get such errors. When using multiple GPUs they have to share data, and perhaps something can go wrong here. The 1080ti worked fine by itself.

    Considering what you are doing, the 3080 would not be rendering anyway for large scenes, so you can just switch the 3080 off in the Iray settings. If you do get it work, the P40 is going to be quite a bit slower than the 3080 of course, but at least still much faster than CPU. Still, for small scenes that should fit VRAM of both cards you might get some crashes.

    I would sell the P40 and use that to buy a 3090 which is rapidly dropping in price. Though I have no idea what the market is on a P40. You can get a 3090 off eBay for $800 these days, though it may have been used for mining. Prices are still dropping, and when Nvidia announces the 4090 in September, I expect a full fire sale on 3090s. IMO that is the best time to grab a 3090. Once the 4090 launches the prices might actually go back up some (that is what happened with the 2080ti).
  • Pharos20Pharos20 Posts: 0

    Yes, I think it is better to sell the P40 and wait for the 3090 to drop more in price. Thanks for this useful explanation

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