GTX 970 SLI vs. Single 980 Ti – Is SLI Worth It?
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GTX 970 SLI vs. Single 980 Ti – Is SLI Worth It?
I have one 970 but I could sell it if needed
PD. I'm poor
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What are you using it for? SLI may good for gaming but Iray doesn't use it.
That said, IRAY will use two GTX 970 cards (no SLI required) but the VRAM is not additive and the scene size before rendering moves to the CPU will be limited by the smallest amount of VRAM available on a single card.
Depends on whether you are doing your artwork for a living or are a hobby artist.. If you are doing it for a living then probably yes, if doing it for a hobby then maybe not as it does get rather expensive..
Absolutely not worth it for gaming since AFR rendering needs to be implemented in-game for SLI to be useful. Two 970s will definitely render faster than a 980 Ti, but think about the cost-to-added performance ratio.
For rendering, or gaming, or both?
It's a better deal for rendering, although as mentioned you won't enable it. It's a simple checkbox in Nvidia's control panel. You'll get very close to 2x performance. I guess I got to redact that after reading some of Sickleyield's posts on the 1070 & 1080 threads. In Octane, it was darn near 2x performance.
It's not as much of a good deal for gaming. Not as close to 2x performance, but I've had issues with it working for plenty of games. It "worked" with SLI enabled, but I wasn't getting any more performance than with 1 card. With some driver versions it actually ran worse. Even with new games. I'm looking at you Fallout 4 and Battlefront.
Hi! This is my newest hobby. I like make things with daz but I'm a gamer too. I would like to be able to use daz and then play a little but I can't do that at the moment because of my render times. It's is very annoying see that your render time is +1 hour for a single image!
How much time it would take to render a image with 2x 980 ti? Just asking I can't afford them
I don't think that's "definite". Have a look at SickleYield's "post your render time" IRAY test scene threads here and on her site. One 980Ti seems to edge out two 970.
Well keep in mind that is very fast, that same image can take days to render in lux. So some of this is about having proper expecations of what is reasonable. The hardware can only go so fast, for a certain cost.
Render times are going to vary image by image based on complexity too, so as you get more familiar with the tools it is possible you learn how to reduce your render times.
Regarding tools like Iray or Octane, the performance increase is linear for each new card you add. So it should be 2X as fast with two cards instead of one.
But the solution isn't always throwing more hardware at things. 3D rendering has always been an art where you spend some time learning how to reduce render times by making adjustments to the assets. This does take time to master however.
Yeah... I'm used to 8+ hour overnight renders. Iray seems to be faster, I don't think with the number of samples, but with reducing noise and maintaining a sharp image. I am far from an expert though and could be wrong.
Back to mdmanouusoso: Just create your scene & get it all ready, then wait to render before you go to bed. If you can actually do a number of scenes, there's this batch renderer I have my eye on:
https://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/?ViewProduct=110993
Thanks Charlie! I didn't know that!
Can I use one gtx 970 and one gtx 980? I mean differents cards. Or I have to have two identicals cards in order to use it with iray?
Thanks scott! But I don't know how to set up a camera yet LOL. Do you know any good tutorial? c:
As long as both cards are the same class of cards you can use different cards.
There are two classes of cards that NVIDIA produces, Quadro, Tesla (Professional or Workstation) and GeForce (Gaming or Hobbiest). So, for example, multiple GeForce cards work just fine together. (GTX 970 and 980Ti in your example). Quadro and Tesla cards use a different driver than the GeForce cards though. So you can mix Quadro and Tesla Cards but you should not mix either Quadro or Tesla Cards with GeForce.
For Iray there is no particular reason to use the "Professional" cards.
Bang for the buck, for Iray, right now, the GTX 980Ti is the best card on the market, though that is likely to change in the near future.
One other thing about setup, If the GTX 970 does the gaming you want, then, for Iray, it is likely best to leave that one connected to your monitors and put the 980Ti in without connecting it to your monitors. :) Keeping all the power of the 980Ti for Iray (And for gaming PhysX.) :)
Weird. That seems counter-intuitive. A single 980Ti wouldn't edge out two 970s from raw additive performance. (edit: had to edit this sentence, not enough coffee, old sentences colliding)
Unless the discrepancy has to do with driver level scheduling between two cards, and the performance difference is related to latency rather than raw FLOP performance.
The 980Ti has lots of cores, almost twice as many as the GTX 970. Typically the 980Ti has a slightly higher clock speed. Those two factors are going to make the 980Ti close in performance to a pair of 970 cards.
Throw in that it takes longer to load the scene onto two cards than it does for one, and in many cases the 980Ti will out perform, just a little, two 970 cards, in most cases.
Thanks!!