Choosing between AMD and nVidia (R9 390, GTX 970)
artphobe
Posts: 97
Hello fellow artists / renderers,
I need help deciding on what graphics card to choose for my next system. My priorities / uses are 70-80% gaming, 30-20% rendering.
I had the 7970 before. It was a good card and I used Reality 2.5 to render. But it didnt support GPU acceleration much and I looked forward to the LuxRender 1.5 and its promised GPU acceleration performance improvements. Since AMD has much superior OpenCL performance, I was really looking foward to that. Then iRay happened and it changed everything. Seeing how fast it achieved results, my mind was dead set on getting and nvidia card.
And then the R9 series happened and the nvidia's 3.5GB + DX12 fiasco and all that. So for now I am mostly settled for the R9 390, because of good OpenCL performance and 8GB VRAM which is definately a plus for complex scenes.
Decision time is closing by and visited the GTX 970 vs R9 390 topic again. I need some data to make an informed decision for my rendering hobby:
1) How fast would a render take (assuming same objects, lights) when comapring iRay vs Reality 4.1/LuxRender? Is it a difference of hours or mins?
2) How much of a problem is 3.5GB of VRAM for the GTX 970? (The 6GB 980 Ti does not makes sense for me because budget) Compared to that, how benefiical is 8GB of VRAM for amaetur - mid level rendering?
Something tells me that the differnce between render times for the GTX 970 would be a couple of minutes and the R9 390 an hour or so. Given this difference, does VRAM balance the argument in the R9's favour?
Thanks in advance for the responses!
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Comments
It is 4 GB of video memory...except, 500 MB is less useful for gaming. For rendering it doesn't really make much of a difference...Iray will see it as 4 GB and use it as such.
For Iray rendering...that 8 GB of AMD RAM is 100% worthless and won't make any improvement. For Luxrender...maybe.
Now, scenes must fit on to the card (memory) in order for Iray to use the card...4 GB is really the minimum amount. It isn't too hard to go past that, even with 'amateur' scenes.
So it seems like a single GTX 970 will severely limit my options. Im trying to look around deviant art, and the results show people rendering with 2x or 3x GTX 970s.
On a side note I did come across this:
Source:http://supalama.deviantart.com/art/Realux-vs-Iray-561883597
Within 5 mins, both Lux and Iray produce acceptable results (well iray is more acceptable - but I guess the lighting hasnt been adjusted on the Lux render), so it seems Iray doesnt have the speed advantage.
But lets compare OpenCL, Radeon 390 vs Geforce 970, Luxrender performance.
On top of that, Anandtech shows Luxmark scores as :
It seems to me that due to the higher number of compute units, the Radeon series graphics cards are still taking the lead. Even an overclocked GTX 970 is not as close to a R9 390. That and comparing the 3.5GB vs 8GB, it seems like the R9 is a clear winner.
Here's to hoping that with AMD's future CUDA compatibility, Radeons would be usable by the iRay renderer.
You're right about the much greater compute power of AMD cards.
It's for that reason, that I don't see nVidia opening up CUDA until they have their own cards that can compete. They'll hang on to their market advantage, even though they are founder members of the OpenCL consortium.
Other than DS, what are you using the graphics card for?
From a practical standpoint, you will be hard pressed to find a visual difference in games between the two. (Note I said from a practical standpoint, not you can't go in and find some minor difference if you go in and dig.)
From a "compute" standpoint unless you are writing code that takes advantage of OpenCL, you aren't going to see much there either. On the other hand there are lots of software, in this field, that takes advantage of CUDA, and the CUDA implementation is, in most cases, more mature, fuller featured, faster, or the only game in town.
So unless you need that compute score, choosing the AMD card locks you out of some software, and doesn't give you the best experience in others. The GTX 970 may be a little slower in the GPU mode of LuxCore (Lux Render) but it still works. The R9 will give you no benefit in Iray, Superfly, VRay, etc.
Simply on OpenCL performance, the AMD Radeons will win out. This is because the OpenCL APIs are more designed for their architecture. CUDA and OPTIX are designed around the nVidia architectures.
Compare the Radeon performance on the OPTIX benchmarks against nVidia cards, and you'll see similar differences only in favor of nVidia. (BTW, OPTIX and CUDA are not closed APIs. They are open, but they require developer registration at nVidia to get access to the libs and headers and docs.)
If you are going to be using Iray, go for the nVidia card. I'm using a 970, and its 4GB does just fine as long as you don't fill the scene with dozens of objects with huge textures. And multiple cards won't help the memory issue.....each card has to have its own copy of the scene.
If you are going to go with Lux, then go for the AMD Radeon cards, as they will perform better with OpenCL than the nVidia cards will.
Well, 80% for gaming. And at the moment the R9 390 seems like a better option as it performs slightly better than the GTX 970, stutters less in high resolution mods of games, and has a better implementation of DX12.
The only place where the R9 390 lacks is power consumption.
buy the AMD and say hello to my little friend LuxRender!
my $0.02
I chose the AMD for many reasons and haven't regreted it. The IRay shaders and lighting still work but the scene has to be renedered using CPU and just takes more time. I have to admit the scenes rendered with CPU look as good as the ones using Nvidia.
Reality has been updated to 4.2.
I also like the AMD for gaming and OpenCL.