AMD HIP vs. NVIDIA CUDA vs. NVIDIA OptiX On Blender 3.2

As noted, while the NVIDIA OptiX Cycles back-end is the fastest for NVIDIA RTX GPUs, even the NVIDIA CUDA back-end with these current-generation GPUs still outperforms the AMD Radeon RX 6000 series with the current HIP back-end. Even using a GeForce RTX 3060 Ti was faster than the RX 6800 XT with Blender's well known "BMW" scene.

With more demanding Blender scenes like "Classroom", the NVIDIA CUDA back-end continued performing well. With this larger scene, the Radeon RX 6800 XT HIP performance was matching that of the GeForce RTX 3070 series. It will be interesting to see how the HIP-RT performance is when that is ready in Blender 3.4 or later.

NVIDIA's OptiX and CUDA back-ends for Blender's Cycles renderer are very stable and working across multiple generations of GPUs. The AMD HIP support at least does work well for the Radeon RX 6000 series / RDNA2 GPUs. When Blender 3.3 or later is out with RDNA1 and Vega working, I'll happily test those older GPUs too in this Blender benchmarking bash.