Nvidia 980ti vs 2070/2080 for Studio rendering
SnowSultan
Posts: 3,773
I've been looking at some specs today of the new generations of Nvidia cards, and while comparisons seem to show the 2070 and 2080 have substantial advantages over the 980ti (which is what I have), they have a similar number of CUDA cores. For rendering in Studio, are there any noticable advantages of either of these cards over the 980ti?
I know the 2080ti is a massive improvement in CUDA and speed, but I can't afford that. ;)
Thanks in advance for any information.
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Do NOT compare CUDA cores accross different generations.
Well that doesn’t answer the question
one would have to look at benchmarks and see how they compare and weigh up the costs over the advantages
It’s easy for me, I cannot afford to upgrade
I believe the 2070 will roundly trounce the 980. It's not just CUDA performance, though the architecture is different so IPC is higher and clock speed they run at is higher. Things like memory clock are much improved over the 980 (8Gb/s v 14Gb/s, DDR5 v DDR6). Moreover, and most importantly, a 2070 will be ready to take advantage of RT in future releases whereas a 980 isn't.
The real question is whether you can justify the cost. They aren't cheap (£450 for the 2070 was the most I've ever spent on a graphics card).
I had a 980ti until recently and was impressed by it often while rendering in DAZ Studio, then I got my hands on an RTX 2080ti and never looked back. More CUDA cores is an easy benchmark as a reason to upgrade, but more memory is very important too. Then the whole new architecture and general electronics update is a bonus no matter what else you are looking at. If DAZ Studio begins to take advantage of the RTX line's ray tracing technology it will probably be yet another very significant reason to upgrade. Perhaps no ONE reason alone is enough to justify the mortgage payment cost of the 2080ti, but ANY two of these reasons is! I'm glad I did it, even though I suffered sticker shock for a couple weeks after.
Thanks for the replies so far. I'm not overly concerned about getting RT compatibility until we hear whether or not it would be of any use in Studio. Real-time shadows would be nice when previewing, but we're going to have to render anyway to get the best quality and I'd rather have speed and memory if I had to choose.
Yeah, I figured a 2080ti would be a huge upgrade. :) Lucky you Gogger, haha. I know SLI doesn't have any benefit for 3D artists, but are you running both cards in the same computer? I'd be interested to know what kind of performance boost having two cards would give Studio (by checking them both in the render settings options).
Part of why I asked this question is that 980tis are still going for almost as much as 2070s in some places, and some comparison graphs show them holding their own against newer cards. The comparions mostly consider them in gaming or video editing situations though, so I'd like to hear from fellow digital artists who could give relevant information and opinions.
*Edit: This was my 1st Post. Started before Goggers and posted about same time as Goggers, but this being my 1st post it was held for review. So it may seem to rehash some of what was already said in last 2 posts.
Have been using a GTX1070 up to now with DS Beta 4.11.0.335 and Nivdia 430.39. From some comparisons that I skimmed over seems that it is fairly comparable-y to a 980ti.
With GTX1070, was tired of waiting for previews in viewport, so I sighed, and took the financial whipping and bought a RTX 2080Ti. Sadly, the card is so big (3lbs and needs vga support stand), that I can't use the next PCI x8 slot for adding back in the GTX1070, because it would mean no air space. And the 4xPCI slot has some critical motherboard wiring nearby so it won't fit there either.
So using only the RTX 2080Ti for the last few days, though not exhaustively tested through several scenarios, would say my performance seems a bit better than 2x+, but not by much. Extra 3GB Vram will come in handy. To answer your question, based on my experience with the RTX2080Ti, am not sure I would describe a move from 980ti to RTX2080 as massive. In my case it made feedback in the viewport tolerable with all the 4k textures for simpler scenes, like getting custom characters created and tested. With GTX1070 it always took a bit longer than I would have liked. Haven't tested out indoor lighting with complex scenes yet, but guess, will be back to long delays before screen gives good feedback.
Am waiting with twinkly eyes for Daz to release a new version with Raytracing the next 6 months. Then think would be more comfortable saying massive improvement. Some of the guys here have posted some prelim stuff that seems to indicate 4-5x performance may be possible with raytracing. Until then, depends how you are using the renderer. If you want quicker feedback in viewport, it helps probably just enough to make the expensive upgrade worthwhile. Depends how you value your time vs available funds.
Update:
Went back and re-ran some earlier simple scenes. 2600x1600px for 1 Character and only Dome/HDRI light with HDRI scene visible. Same iterations and convergence. 2min vs 22 minutes. That is massive! Another re-test. 2200x2600px two outfitted gals with newer HP hair & 4K HDRI was 1min40secs vs 8.5 minutes for 60% Convergence (which looked pretty good). Also pretty massive. But not nearly as much as 1st example. Whereas rerunning a more complex scene with 3 sources of light from different directions and no denoiser the observation of 2x+ holds. Not really masive there. Main message is using a RTX2080Ti, the viewport performance is just fast enough that as an artist when you make key changes, you get feedback in a fairly quick turn-around. Like less than 20 seconds to re-render and see new texture choices crisp enough to decide if intended effect works. Fast enough that you feel like you're getting somewhere and not always waiting. I don't know the difference in jump from RTX2080 to RTX2080ti. But at least this may give you an idea of what top-end may achieve. This card is still very new to me, so don't have better feedback.
Thank you Saxa for the detailed information (and for posting for the first time to help). :) So your 2 min vs 22 minute test was an RTX 2080ti against a GTX 1070? I'll check the stats on a 1070 to compare them to my 980ti then. That is an amazing increase in performance...urgh, I don't think I make art often enough to justify that price though, haha...
There is a rule of thumb that mostly holds true for recent generations of cards, the older generation card is roughly equivalent to the new generation's card one step lower. So your 980ti is roughly equivalent to a 1080 and a 2070.
I don't have a 10 or 20 series card; differences in generations make comparing using CUDA quantity prone to inacuracies.
rule of thumb and mostly; now there is a contradiction that could get some in trouble.
Yup yup :) Did find it weird though how different scene setups and complexities can lead to such different performance results. That 2 vs 22 minute was for the simplest scene of a nudie body, some hair, makeup and an HDRI Dome. Not sure if that was an anomaly. But at times the feedback is really fast compared to the old GTX1070, which was none to shabby either.
I nearly threw-up lol when I pushed the order button. But when I end up waiting for viewport feedback, I end up not wanting to do more stuff with Daz. So given how much stuff I hadf bought from Daz I was kinda stuck now having to buy it to make me want to use it. LOL.
I probably WOULD run the 980ti with the 2080ti if my motherboard would allow it, but they would be jam packed in there with no air between and I know that's a recipe for complete and totoal disaster, so the 980ti will go in my secondary computer to give it an upgrade.
And I knowe what you mean about the 980ti holding its own! I had no idea what a gem I was getting when I made the leap and bought it what seems like AGES ago now. I didn't upgrade because the 980ti was a disappointment, just felt things could be bigger, better, faster and I had gotten so much great mileage out of the 980ti that I felt I had gotten more than my money's worth out of it.
What Saxa said!
FWIW - I originally "settled" for the regular 2080 because the guy at the store checked and told me they didn't have the 2080ti's in store or online and wouldn't be getting any more ever. I must admit, I was a little disappointed in the (not impressive) difference in performance between the 2080 and the 980ti, so two weeks later when I walked into the store and there is one single 2080ti sitting there on the shelf (obviously new, not returned) I snatched it up before anyone else could take it from right in front of me and I returned the 2080. The 2080ti performs EXACTLY as SAXA says, usually within 22 seconds you have enough of a render to know if it is worth letting continue. Talk about a time saver! My time is worth $$ to me and buying the 2080ti saves me some time, facilitates my creativity and so is worth every penny to me. Sometimes I use denoiser mode and sometimes not. RT might be a pie-in-the-sky future feature, but with this card, I am ready on day 1.
So, go ahead, sell that kidney - you have two! - get the 2080ti if you can manage it. You won't be sorry!
I have no idea what store you shopped at but 2080ti's are in plentiful supply. I'm lucky that I live near a Microcenter but if it didn't I'd order from NewEgg or Amazon to get computer parts.
It was actually Best Buy and I was there because I was using my Best Buy credit card (and Rewards points!) - it was the only way I could afford the 2080ti at that moment. The guy checked for the specific RTX 2080ti I was asking for, then "2080" in general and nothing came up. I knew the 1080's were being phased out or bought up by Bitcoin miners so it didn't seem especially odd to me that a card, of any sort, would no longer be available. He *seemed* competent enough and I used to work at a computer store (CompUSA) so knew what to look for and what sounded reasonable and not. In any case in the end I got what I wanted.
Each generation of GPU has a different version of CUDA. All 900 series cards have CUDA 5.x (the exact version can vary), the 1000 series is 6.x, and the newest 2000 series is 7.5. This is why you cannot compare the CUDA count between generations directly. Basically, the newer GPUs have more efficient CUDA cores.
Additionally, the RTX cards have Tensor and dedicated Ray Tracing cores. The newest beta for Daz supports Tensor for denoising. As of right now, Daz Iray does not take advantage of these new RT cores. However, Daz Steve is on record stating that Daz Studio will get support for the Ray Tracing cores "in 2019". So when this happens, the 2000 series *should* see quite a performance boost. Other render engines have seen some dramatic improvements when they added full RT support. I don't see how Daz would be any different.
This means that the 2000 series is the way to go when looking towards the future. They are ALREADY pretty darn fast for rendering, and this is without RT support. RTX could change everything, because I believe that even the lowest RTX card, the 2060, will be much faster than any non-RTX card once Daz gets this update. Faster than a 1080ti. Now to be clear, this is only my own speculation, but I believe the basis for it is sound. I am going by the testing done in other render engines, and in those engines, the 2060 out performs the 1080ti by a wide margin with RTX enabled. In fact, in the testing I linked in the bench thread, the 2060 with RTX enabled was even FASTER than the 2080ti with RTX OFF.
Like whoa. So yes, the 2000 series is expensive, but if the performance gains from RTX are real, they will be worth it.
The big question is WHEN will Daz Studio get this update? It would be nice if we had just a little more information to go on. I know the people at Daz love to play it close to the vest, but lets think about the customers here. People are trying to decide on what GPU to buy. It sure would suck for somebody who saved up their hard earned money to buy a 1070 when it turns out the 2060 could run circles around it with RTX enabled. This information is important to have.
I think it would be a good customer service to inform the customer base that RTX support is coming soon, and give some idea of how much faster it could be for everyday rendering. The only record we have is not on this forum. The cat is already out of the bag, so lets help people out so they can make better informed purchase decisions. After all, I could be totally wrong in my prediction about performance.
Pretty nice that we can still be quite enthused about the new card despite the groaner price! :) Cue gif of anime-gal being run over by a street-steamer with an Nvidia logo, then jump up afterwards and dance happily with her new toy.
Yes it's that much of a diff. And no I do not work for Nvidia lol.
Just another counter-opinion here.
From what I have read here and there and observed, Daz is a smaller business operation. For example, main customer support gets closed for the weekends depsite being a busy time and they catch up with tickets during the week. That size of operation has probably a few key staff doing this development work. Unexpected obstacles are 99% likely, and quite possibly big design decisions have to be made. What's if one key person has a family health issue and is suddenly unavailable? Possibly months of instant delays.
For Daz to publically share developments and plans too often creates unrealistic expectations in many users. And when those expectations aren't met, it tends to create bad feelings and PR. If some of those users then went on to buy stuff based on those "guidelines". Well there will be people here endlessly ranting, like some do about the Mass Effect 3 ending (still to this very day) ;)
If I was involved with Daz, the decision for me would be easy. There is just too much to risk & lose about talking what may or may not come. And it takes time too. Main thing is we know that RTX is seen as a vital next platform step for Daz. And am pretty sure the Daz management knew that someone here would find Daz CEO statement in the Nvidia Presentation. That taken with with Daz Steve's short but promising statement here in the forums that gave a rough timeline for some exciting developments means they are working to make Daz better and more exciting. If Daz Steve was taking about RTX is impossible to say, but main thing is they are wanting to make Daz more exciting to use which is just a good thing.
Personally feel Daz is handling this just right given the unknowns of new product implementation. Just another opinion though, and subject to change.
PS. Lurked here for last few months as a Noobie. So despite my first post being a contrary-opinion, just wanted to say I enjoyed many of your techncial posts. :)
Thanks again to those giving useful and detailed insights. I think I've decided to at least consider a 2080ti as a possible future upgrade if the performance improvements are THAT big. Maybe I can find a video on Youtube showing the rendering in real-time and compare it to my own, because I'm actually fairly impressed with the Iray preview speed of my 980ti. I'll still wait until we hear something from DAZ about RT support, but it's good to hear that the potential for it to be beneficial is there. Thanks again for the valuable information.
I can't possibly disagree more. I am not saying Daz should go and spill the beans on everything they have planned. Just this ONE THING. Because this one thing is a BIG thing. This is potentially one of the biggest things to happen to Daz Studio since the introduction of Iray itself. Maybe they knew we would spot Steve's statement...but that is no excuse to almost go completely silent in the actual Daz forums. In the forum, Steve was so vague he could have been talking about anything, he did not even mention the statement Nividia posted. He already made the statement...so why could he not make it here? This is about transparency and honesty with your paying customers.
For most people, buying a new GPU is pretty serious purchase. These people deserve to know what direction their software is headed so they can make the most informed purchase possible. Just think if somebody spent their hard earned money on a 1000 series GPU and then Daz releases RTX support the next day or week. That would sting quite a bit, no? Octane and Vray have no issues talking about what they have planned. And while that has resulted in some setbacks (like Octane's vow to support AMD which dates back 4 years), the positives FAR out weigh the negatives.
Daz doesn't need to give an exact date. You can't break a promise if you don't give a date! Why is this such a difficult thing? Daz has a small staff, but they do not develop the Iray plugin in any capacity. They install the plugin like any other plugin.
This is what I would do. Yo Daz Steve, if you want to copy paste this, you have my permission.
"Hey guys, we know you are looking forward to RTX support, and so are we! We are working hard to bring you full RTX support as soon as we can. We cannot give you an exact date, but Daz Studio WILL support RTX acceleration, and it will be amazing for rendering performance. RTX will bring Daz Studio the largest performance gain in a single generational leap we have ever seen. I dare say, it will be a game changer for us all!"
There you go. No exact date promised, but simple confirmation that Daz Studio will get this support, along with a hint at performance. That is more than we currently have. I don't see how this presents a problem in any capacity. And should something unexpected happen, then once again, be HONEST about it. "Hey, we are sorry, but one of our staff has had a serious family emergency and this has effected out ability to provide you with this new feature as fast as we hoped."
Being honest about the situation would bring far more sympathetic responses. People would be bummed for sure, but the vast majority would be understanding of the situation. Actually, I think something like this might even bring the community together more.
How is some honesty a bad thing?
GPU mining is pretty much dead and there is no shortage of supply of 20xx cards.
Hi. Don't really want to get into a debate about at what point has "some honesty" occurred. For starters it would be a big debate if we followed through discussing all the different underlying stuff for each of our opinions. TBH, I'd rather render lol.
From the 2 short, but "heavily loaded with promising futures eventually" DAZ statements we have so far this year, I feel quite positive about a pretty good chance of some nice things happening this year. Did not buy my new card relying on this. But I am hoping. And made my purchase accordingly. Both of us seem to have strong feelings on this Daz Dev communciation process. And both unmoved.
Will sign off by saying N7 FemShep is sorely missed. So many good memories. Thanks for making me remember.
Don't forget that RTX support will only arrive when nVidia has updated Iray to support it, which is something over which DAZ has no control whatsoever, though it is possible (though not certain), that nVidia have told DAZ when this might happen. Unfortunately, from what I have read elsewhere, Iray is not a priority for nVidia.
Nvidia has publicly said that RTX support will be added to iray this year.
That depends what you mean by "the Iray plug-in"- nVidia develps, and supplies as a compiled module, the Iray renderer but Daz does develop the plug-in that integrates it into DS.
I disagree; release date of the cards was 20th September, 2018 (or there abouts). Good customer service would have been all features being implemented (a few bugs is not so bad, but at least implemented), and certainly within a week or two of release (not 3 weeks for example).
Coming soon is a long way from acceptable 7 months after the cards were available.
Well, I suppose we can be grateful it might not be a year after release of the card, but it could be.
Well the time we wait is all on Nvidia. Daz cannot do anything until they receive the updated Iray SDK from Nvidia. So you need to direct any misgivings over Iray's support to Nvidia themselves, not Daz. Now perhaps you could argue their choice to use Iray in the first place, but I digress...
I understand that part of the process, I just don't understand why it has to be so secretive as to when or even IF Daz will receive these updates. Back n the forums, Daz Steve's statement never mentioned Iray or rendering. He could have been talking about dforce, or maybe Daz Studio coud be getting a Hatsune Miku concert creation app for all we know, LOL. There was no reference to the statement Nvidia quoted him for. If Nvidia had never posted this, would we have ever found out?
There has been much open disscussion about the future of Iray. The fate of Iray is vitally important to just about everybody here. Iray is such an itegral part of Daz Studio today, what would happen in the hypothetical scenario where Nvidia throws in the towel on Iray and ends its development? Iray ended Mental Ray support a few years ago, it has happened before.
So there are users on the forum who have genuine concerns about Iray. For people that are concerned...do you think such people would be buying Daz products as much? Consumers need to have confidence before investing. This is something that can directly impact Daz Studio's sales.
That is WHY it is so important for somebody to speak up and assure their customers that Daz will get RTX support. This goes beyond helping inform people of what GPU to buy. It is something that effect people buying from Daz, period. If you know something, please tell us.
It just so happens that we have discovered an answer today. But NOT from Daz Studio. Once again, our information comes from Nvidia rather than anyone from Daz Studio. This is huge news, so here is a screen shot:
And if you are curious, here is Daz Studio's logo in another slide:
So Iray still lives! At least it is using the same name, its hard to say what has changed under the hood. And we have a date, MAY. We do not have the exact day, perhaps that is in flux, but it is already May 7, so that means the SDK should drop any time in the next 3 weeks. Then the people at Daz will get their hands on it and integrate it. That may take a month or two, given past history. So if history holds up, we should be seeing a new Daz Studio with RTX support around July.
Not only does this slide give us a date, it also gives us a performance claim. Up to 5 times faster than before. Honestly that doesn't sound so far fetched given how well RTX has performed in other render engines, in fact it basically mirrors how well RTX has enhanced other render engines. I believe a speed up of 2-3X is likely what most people will see in everyday use, but it will vary depending on scene makeup. If you happen to enjoy rendering cars in Daz Studio, then perhaps you will enjoy the up to 5X speed up they claim. Now you ask 5X over what? I believe that is simply RTX ON vs OFF.A 2080ti, having the most RT cores, could be the GPU to potentially see that 5X over its performce without RTX. But I feel pretty confident the rest of the RTX lineup will perform well with RTX enabled.
I am interested in making the leap from 980ti to 2080ti. Do you have updated benches with the new RTX support in 4.12?
Look for the thread in this forum.
turn on RTX support was stated ..is this an automatic thing or is there a setting in DS to do this? or is it via the GPU card?