Blender 3.0 Benchmarks - Performance Across 19 Different NVIDIA GPUs

Last week marked the debut of the highly anticipated Blender 3.0 open-source 3D modeling software. Since then I have been very busy putting Blender 3.0 through its paces with a lot of performance benchmarking across various CPUs and GPUs.

Today's article is focusing on the NVIDIA GPU render performance with Blender 3.0. Unfortunately, the AMD HIP support for Blender on Linux didn't make the v3.0 cut but is being targeted for Blender 3.1 next year. As such on Linux right now with Blender 3.0 the only form of GPU acceleration is using the NVIDIA proprietary driver stack with Blender's CUDA or OptiX back-ends. The OpenCL support was removed as part of the "Cycles X" work and thus for now Linux users will have either just CPU-based rendering or NVIDIA support.

For those interested in the CPU-based Blender 3.0 performance, I have been testing the new release out on many different systems. While not the focus of today's article, you can see many CPU reference figures via the OpenBenchmarking.org test profile page. E.g.

More to come soon and you can see how your own Blender 3.0 performance compares to these results by installing the Phoronix Test Suite and running phoronix-test-suite benchmark blender-3.0.0 for your own fully-automated, side-by-side benchmark comparison.

When it comes to the Blender 2.93 vs. 3.0 performance, there are some nice improvements especially when it comes to the NVIDIA GPU performance. Let's take a look at that first.