GTX-980 compared to GTX-1080 for rendering purposes

baha_timimi

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Mar 8, 2010
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Hi
I have GTX-980 graphic card, my mainly use is Rendering in 3DMAX using V-Ray RT which depend on the cuda cores of the graphic card.
If I transport to GTX-1080 is it worth for this purpose or it will produce the same performance.
 
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I recently went from 980 to 1080 with my 4K gaming video's. You would expect a decent difference upgrading to the 1080 but not that much.

A 4K gaming video of about 15 mins only knocked off a couple of mins in rendering time. Not a noticeable difference which I was surprised.

Recording 4K gaming: GForce Experience
Rendering software: Powerdirector 14
Nvidia EVGA 980 ACX 2.0
Nvidia MSI 1080 Sea Hawk X (Hybrid)

Difference in Video card temps: 980 140F/60C 1080 under 100F/37C
980: (1) Final 6:28min 4K gaming video processed in 8:02mins another video (2) 7:20/8:08min processing time
1080: (1) Final 9:35 min 4K gaming video processed in12:11mins

*This biggest consideration is not so much the 1080 better than the 980, but the software...


for cuda cores the 980 has 2048 and the 1080 has 2560 but the 1080 has 8gb vram which may be helpful
 
but when I make rendering in 3DMax the vram not stressed . So is this mean that the difference is just the cuda count? which meam the differance is just 25%
So, if I make 980SLI will be better than single 1080?
 
Greetings,

You raise an excellent question. So much focus is placed upon these cards regarding gaming, so sometimes knowing how a consumer card will work for professional work can be challenging. I have not tested these two cards to compare them specifically, so I won't attempt to say that you will absolutely see better performance, but I think there is more to it than just the number of CUDA. If you consider clock speeds as well, you will see that there is a big difference between the two.

The 980 has a clock speed of 1126 base and 1216 boost, whereas the 1080 has a clock speed of 1607 base and 1733 boost. That is around a 50% increase. Couple that with the increase of CUDA in the 1080 and I would be surprised if you didn't see noticeable improvement over the 980.

Generally, 3D rendering does not benefit from an SLI or even just stacked cards as it is usually CPU intensive, and generally not programmed to take advantage of SLI/stack, so a double 980 setup will not likely show any benefit...However, 3DS Max is attuned for CUDA, so there may be a difference there, but I would recommend researching into the program to see if it is tuned to take advantage of a second computing gpu...I don't use that program to render (I use Raylectron on top of Sketchup), so I won't attempt to speak to it's finer characteristics or abilities here.

Another consideration since you use 3DS Max, is that Nvidia has specific drivers built into the Quadro cards to work directly with 3DS Max to improve workflow. These drivers are not available in the consumer cards like the 980 or 1080, so this might be worth looking into for you...however, if you are also wanting to game on the system, the Quadro will stumble there, and I won't even speculate as to whether or not it can support VR.

The 1080 is a little cheaper than the newer lower level Quadro M4000, but if you are using the system for professional output only, the Quadro may be a better consideration for you. Ultimately it comes down to system usage overall and budget...and looks are important to some as well, and I would not fault anyone for wanting a new sexy 1080 peeking out of their windowed case over an older card or drab looking Quadro😛

I hope this info has been helpful!
 
Having more than one GPU in your system will most certainly decrease your render times if you are using Vray RT, which is a GPU based render engine and uses no CPU power whatsoever.

However, due the new architecture of the 1080, and its faster clock speeds, one 1080 will still render much quicker than two 980's. What you must also remember, is that the CUDA sdk hasnt quite been realeased yet for the 1080, so most of your GPY render engines do not support the cards yet. This will hopefully change soon.

I am in the process of creating a render server with two 1080's, and no need to SLI bridge them either, the engine will pick up both cards and use them to render over the PCI bridges. Nice thing with the 1080's as well is that they have the NV Link technology, so both cards can share each others memory and you basically get 16 GB of VRAM instead of just the 8 GBs.

And yes, the 980ti has more CUDA cores, but the new architecture of the 1080's can do more with less cores. You could however pick up the 980ti's cheaper now, and still get good renders out of them.

Adios.
 


 


yes for cuda you get 4096 cuda cores when sli enable
gtx 690 has kelper architecture and have 4gb vram with 3072 cuda cores it also a card just purpose of rendering



 
I recently went from 980 to 1080 with my 4K gaming video's. You would expect a decent difference upgrading to the 1080 but not that much.

A 4K gaming video of about 15 mins only knocked off a couple of mins in rendering time. Not a noticeable difference which I was surprised.

Recording 4K gaming: GForce Experience
Rendering software: Powerdirector 14
Nvidia EVGA 980 ACX 2.0
Nvidia MSI 1080 Sea Hawk X (Hybrid)

Difference in Video card temps: 980 140F/60C 1080 under 100F/37C
980: (1) Final 6:28min 4K gaming video processed in 8:02mins another video (2) 7:20/8:08min processing time
1080: (1) Final 9:35 min 4K gaming video processed in12:11mins

*This biggest consideration is not so much the 1080 better than the 980, but the software you use. Powerdirector 14 can process 4K video extremely fast with great quality. I am compressing 4K video almost at live speed :)
 
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