18-Way NVIDIA GPU Performance With Blender 2.90 Using OptiX + CUDA

Written by Michael Larabel in NVIDIA on 6 September 2020 at 11:40 AM EDT. 7 Comments
NVIDIA
A few days ago I published a deep dive into the CPU and GPU performance with Blender 2.90 as a major update to this open-source 3D modeling software. Following that I kept on testing more and older NVIDIA GPUs with the CUDA and OptiX back-end targets to now have an 18-way comparison from Maxwell to Turing with the new Blender 2.90.

Given the Blender 2.90 performance changes over Blender 2.8x as outlined in the earlier article, here is a fresh look at how the NVIDIA GPU performance compares for this large range of graphics processors. Additionally, with Blender 2.90 is now OptiX support for non-RTX GPUs. While RTX GPUs still perform the best with the Blender OptiX support, non-RTX GPUs can now work for this back-end and in some cases perform better than the CUDA back-end.
NVIDIA Blender 2.90 GPU Performance

Tests were done using the Maxwell/Pascal/Turing GPUs I had easily accessible for testing. No word yet on Ampere cards for Linux testing but hopefully we'll have some soon. Though Blender 2.90 does lack support for the RTX 3000 series but hopefully with an updated CUDA build that the next Blender release will have support for these brand new GPUs.
NVIDIA Blender 2.90 GPU Performance

NVIDIA Blender 2.90 GPU Performance

NVIDIA Blender 2.90 GPU Performance

NVIDIA Blender 2.90 GPU Performance

Continue to OpenBenchmarking.org to see the ten benchmarks ran on Blender 2.90 in full across the 18 graphics cards available for testing. From there on OpenBenchmarking.org is also the ability to trivially create performance-per-dollar graphs based on your local pricing or used pricing for the older models, etc.
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About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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