What differentiates all these 2080 ti cards?
Sevrin
Posts: 6,301
in The Commons
So, I'm considering upgrading from my 8 Gb 1070 to a new card, while perhaps using the old card for support, and I'm seeing all these 2080ti cards going from CAD 1500ish to 2500ish (CAD is in the terlet RN). I understand that I needn't pay attention to overclocking, but it doesn't appear that there are bargains to be found by avoiding it, since that part of the market is skewed toward gaming features. Is the bottom end as good as the higher end as far as Iray rendering goes?
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Yes, any Nvidia card is essentially the same as any other of the same model card.
Except for the cooling features. Generally speaking in a decent case a single card will have no issue no matter what the cooling is. However in a poorly ventilated case multiple cards could get pretty hot during a long render which could effect performance.
If I was buying one I'd get the cheapest one available from a reputable manufacturer.
Should all those early cards with the problems be out of the pipeline by now? There are a lot of horror stories on sites like Newegg.
If you don't have it get MSI afterburner and everytime you run a iray render turn the fan on your video card to 100% That nice nvidia 1070 is a great card but it was designed for gaming and the fan profile is setup to be for gaming. Iray rendering is very hard on the video card heat wise, so proper ventilation is a must!!! In my systems with more than one card I take off the side panel from my pc and point a cheap table top house fan at my cards. I also turn all the fans on my video cards to 100%. Your investment in you pc hardware will last longer with good cooling.
They should be but it should be kept in mind that according to several independent sources the RMA rate on those cards wasn't unusually high. It just got a lot of attention for some reason. Any time you are dealing with several thousand highly complicated device a cetain percentage will be defective.
Nvidia provides the chipset, and the different brands build out the rest. There may be some slight variance in clockspeeds, they test for the faster ones and those get the more expensive models with higher clocks you see. The main difference is going to be the cooler. Each brand has their own method, and different models can have different quality coolers. But in general these cards are going to be very similar to each other since they are all 2080tis.
I recommend doing this as well, at least setting up an aggressive fan curve (maybe not necessarily 100% all the time). However I would like to point out that many video games actually work a GPU harder than Daz Iray. A lot of us assume Iray is the worst thing they can do on a GPU, it is not! I have plenty of games that make my cards run hotter than Iray, like 10C or more than what I hit running Iray. The reason for that is that while the chip core will run flat out in Iray, other parts of the GPU do not work as hard as they would with a game. A video game is constantly making calls for memory, which Iray will not do. That task alone makes the card run hotter.
But it is true that cooling is vital. If you are looking at multiple cards, since you are talking about a 1070 and a 2080ti at the same time, then cooling is even more important. So one important thing to look at when buying a new card is its cooling performance. A good gaming card should have good cooling. Another thing to consider is the physical size of the card. Don't forget this! If you are going to use the 1070, then you need to make sure the 2080ti is not so fat that there is no space between the cards. The 2080ti will generate a lot more heat, and many of them have very large coolers. But a large cooler does not always equal better, and it certainly wont be better if the cards cannot breath if they are too close together.
And your case better be good for airflow, too. You can help it with good cable management, keep the cables from blocking the air as much as possible.
I have two 1080tis, and I have done several combinations prior, so I have some experience with this. With Iray they will hit about 70 and 65 respectively. But with gaming, I can hit as high as 82 or so. I just use one for gaming, and it is worth pointing out that I use the cooler card for gaming. So the card that runs 65 with Iray can hit 82 when gaming and the other card is idle so its not producing heat. That is pretty big difference! Part of that is because I like playing at high frame rates, but even if I didn't do that some games can still push it very hard. Games can push a GPU hard two ways: either by going high resolution (like 4K or higher), or by pushing very high frame rates, or both. Even the 2080ti can struggle to keep the newest most demanding games at a decent frame rate when at 4K.
The big thing to look at is the size of the cards. Many 2080ti's and more than two slots thick. 2.5 and 2.75 is not uncommon. Some of them are also very tall. You might have trouble fitting them inside your computer. I went with the cards made by Invidia as they are standard hight and only 2 slots thick.
Thanks for all the info. The 1070 I have is from Asus, and I can track temps and change fan speeds with the GPU Tweak utility that came with it. We're getting cooler weather and I don't overheat, so temps are maxxing at 70C now rather than the 80C it was running during the hotter weather.
My next concern is timing. I'm wondering whether we will start to see deeper discounts of Nvidia cards with Black Friday approaching and AMD stepping up its game with the upcoming Navi cards and Intel looming with their mysterious Xe. If Bitcoin breaks out, then all bets will be off, but since I can manage for now, I think I'll still wait a bit. I mean, what are we without hope?
I just bought a 2070 super, it was DOA, still waiting on my refund :(
I think I am going to go with a 2080 super when I get my refund, the TI is way too rich for my blood though. It's like 2 grand + after taxes here in maple syrup land @.@
I'm just wondering whether running a 2070 (or 2080) in a system with an already existing 1070 would limit the RTX capabilities of the RTX card? I'm thinking about how IRay was limited to 4GB VRAM when I had a 970 (4GB) and a 1070 (8GB) being used together to render a scene. In other words, rendering was limited to the capabilities of the lower spec card. Does this translate to 1070 > 2070 (or 2080) combinations?
Iray will not use a card for rendering if the scene won't fit on the card. So a 1070 and 2070 since both have 8Gb all scenes that fit on one should fit on the other. the 2070 will just render faster.
Yep, I know about the VRAM but I only mentioned that because it illustrates a limitation of using the two cards (970/4GB and 1070/8GB) together. My question was regarding any other limitations - specifically when it comes to RTX. I'm guessing that my 1070 can't do what a 2070 (or 2080) can do with RTX so is IRay limited by the capabilities of the lower-spec (GTX) card? I don't know how else to explain - maybe I shouldn't have mentioned memory.
Let's put it a different way: the 2070 can perform ray tracing (hence RTX) but the 1070 can't (GTX) so, when it comes to an IRay render using both cards together, is the render limited to the capabilities of the lesser card (GTX) or can it combine the GTX and RTX features for the same render?
In this case you're okay. The 2080 will do it's RTX thing and the secondary card will help.
When I get a working card, I should be able to say if I can think up a good way to test it lol. I am keeping my 1070 as a secondary helper card. Still waiting on my refund, once I got the cash I am gonna get a 2070 super or 2080 super depending on how the prices are.
Its kind of hard to test because we have no way of truly knowing if the ray tracing cores are actually running or not. But I would tend to think that even if the RT cores are idle, that the combined CUDA cores will be better in many scenes.
There is that RTX focused benchmark that was posted recently. https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/344451/rtx-benchmark-thread-show-me-the-power/p1 One way to test is to run that particular scene with the RTX card by itself. Then render that scene with both cards. If the 1070 causes the RT cores to not work, then I would assume that the two cards combined might be slower than the test with only the RTX card, because some people are seeing CRAZY speed boosts in that test scene with RTX cards. You could also compare the times between Daz 4.11 and 4.12, as only 4.12 offers RTX boosts, but Iray is different and performs differently in general, so direct comparisons are a little tricky. Even so, the RTX boost in that scene is so extreme that it should be apparent regardless.
For me, at this point I'll probably wait for the next batch of GPUs in 2020. I believe 2020 is going to be an amazing year for GPU hardware, because competition will be as fierce as it has ever been in that industry. AMD will be releasing new GPUs that have their own brand of ray tracing to compete directly with RTX. Even Intel is releasing GPUs in 2020 for the first time ever, though it is unknown if they will have ray tracing (it seems unlikely at this point). And Nvidia will be set to release their next generation follow up to Turing, which should be on 7nm nodes. That alone should equate to big performance gains, but I also believe Nvidia will be pushing their RTX as hard as possible to hold both AMD and Intel off. That means 3 big companies will be fighting for our money in 2020, so prices could potentially be lower across the board. Thus even though Iray can only use Nvidia, we all still benefit from the healthy competition. I think I can hold out until then. I already have two 1080tis myself, and the only real upgrade would be a 2080ti because I do want the 11GB VRAM. I was going to buy one, but other things have happened to delay me. Its not like I'm desparate or anything for faster renders right now.
Just look at the Supers that got released. I personally do not think they would exist without AMD releasing the 5700 and 5700XT. The Supers are proof IMO of what competition can do, and the 5700 cards are not even the best AMD has coming. Next year AMD will release their "big" Navi, which will include ray tracing. Its going to be a wild ride in 2020.
I have benchmark results from my 2070/1080ti combo on 4.11 and 4.12. Enabling RTX definitely sped up the pair.
All good. My reason for asking the questions was in the spirit of the OP and also to determine whether a combination of GTX and RTX technology would be feasible. All of us are probably going to need to upgrade sooner or later and my thinking was along the lines of: do I keep my 1070 and run it together with a 2070 Super or do I try to sell my 1070 to offset the cost of the 2070 (or even a 2080 Super). I have to say that my thinking now is probably to hang fire until next year and follow the lead of @outrider42 and wait for that generation of cards to appear.
Iray operates asynchonously when it comes to rendering across multiple hardware devices for general load balancing purposes. Each GPU or CPU enabled for rendering in the system gets sent its own individual sets of iterations/pixel sample coordinates to work on for inclusion in a master framebuffer. Consequently whatever hardware features or software APIs any one GPU or CPU in a system may utilize has no bearing on the performance characteristics of any others. So virtually any combination of GTX/RTX GPU or Intel/AMD CPU hardware utilizing any combination of OptiX Prime, RTCore (via OptiX), or Embree based raytracing acceleration will give you almost perfect rendering performance scaling in comparison to how each individual one of those devices performs on their own.
The only exception to this is having one device enabled for rendering among others that happens to lag significantly behind all the rest in terms of sheer rendering performance. In this case, Iray is hardcoded to assume that the device in question is malfunctioning, and will re-assign that device's current workload to other devices in the system for completion and ignore any further communications from the lagging device until it is once again ready to accept a new workload. This has the net effect of slightly lowering overall rendering performance from the max attainable with the lagging device disabled (hence why virtually all users with current high-end graphics cards see slightly worse rendering performance with their CPUs also enabled for rendering than without.) And is best avoided by not mixing very slow GPUs (think cheap ones from 3+ generations ago) or virtually ANY affordable modern CPU with one or more current high-end GPUs for Iray rendering.
Which is very true, I have No Mans Sky with all the bells and whistles turned up to max looking at GPUZ the GPU load is low, but the temp will go over 60 degrees C.. Where as with iRay the GPU load is high, but the temp sits around the high 40's to low 50's.. I have a custom fan curve where I have it at 30% for 30 degrees C and it ramps up from there..
The general consensus, not sure if it's actually true, is that blower cooling is nowhere as efficient as open-air cooling systems. This matter because excessive heat can cause a GPU to dump performance to shed heat, and might affect the longevity of the GPU if consistently run at high temperatures for long periods. Probaly more a problem for gamers than DS hobyists.
Ended up grabbing a 2080 super, I can't believe I just spent 1500 on a single PC component. This better not be DOA, and better last a few years, yeesh lol.
Welcome to my world. :0
Pretty please don't forget/neglect to put it through it's benchmarking paces here on the forum. Afaik the 2080 SUPER (or really any SUPER variant for that matter) has yet to make its way into anyone's hands here.
Absolutely. It's one of the ways I planned on deciding wether or not I need to beat my head against the desk for spending so much on a GPU lol.
I thought that was the case, but its good to know. So in the future I could get a 3080ti and pair it with the trusty 1080ti.
You can sometimes buy extended warranties on these if you are concerned. If you bought EVGA, they offer a 5 year and a 10 year plan. The cost is based on price, but it caps at US $500. The 5 year plan caps at $30, and the 10 year plan caps at $60. The time length includes the standard 3 year manufacturer warranty, so the 5 year plans adds an extra 2 years, the 10 year plan adds 7. You are covered for the full term, meaning that you can get your card repaired/replaced as many times as it may need. I have dealt with EVGA's RMA process before thanks to a lightning strike killing my 1080ti, and I was very happy with them. You want to know the best part...I bought the GPU used from ebay. It still has a warranty on it, and EVGA's warranties will transfer to second hand buyers. Basically whoever owns the card, if the card is under warranty, it is still covered.
I know I probably sound like I am paid spokesperson here, but I just think that this warranty is genuinely fantastic deal that is unmatched by anybody else. You can add the warranty to almost any EVGA product purchased from any retailer. Just go to the EVGA website within I think 2 weeks and you can purchase the warranty there when registering the product.
Also, just a note, EVGA power supplies now include a 10 year warranty as standard. I thought that was pretty interesting.
Darn, I mighta went with a EVGA one if I knew that, went with MSI RTX 2080 Super Gaming X Trio, got a 2 year warrantee with it through amazon. I had a EVGA 660, it still works, got it in my spare part box still.
And I would have waited 6 months if I had known the RTX 2080 I bought would be replaced by the better 2080 Super for the same price.
Life is full with what-ifs but I'm sure you'll be completely happy with your 2080 Super. I have a MSI Gaming Trio and it's as solid as a rock.
If it works! One of the things I really liked was the metal plate on it, and three fans should be nice!
That metal plate on the Trio can get vey hot to the extent I can't hold my hand on it. Which could mean it's probably doing the job it was designed for... dissipiting.
The enemy of computer components is heat built-up, and the Trio seems to very effectively get that heat away from the GPU. I leave the side panel off my rig to help that dissipation of heat, but that means I need to blow out accumilated dust regularly with it open and exposed to all the dust and skin particles I shed that build up on the components. And keep the cat out of my room!
You could try geoshells on you and the cat that would prevent all those particles escaping. Then the heat build-up on you might become an issue, though.
One thing that I learned and was kind of surprising is that, I think it was Tom’s Hardware Page, a large differentiator is cooling. All the cards are fine for a single setup, but all bets are off if you’ve got a multiple GPU setup. They had a chart showing how both cards started throttling to reduce their temperature and not damage themselves. Apparently my setup works but by the grace of god and you’re really supposed to use special “blower” versions of the cards if you’ve got 2, 3, or 4 GPUs. I didn’t have any problems and performance scaled like I expected it to, but now I’m just wondering if i’m really qualified to build my own rig????