Which GTX cards to use for IRAY rendering workstation? 780ti or 980

[ty1er]

I'm in the process of building a new workstation for mainly running 3ds max and creating images with its IRAY render. Since IRAY can be processed on both the CPU and benefits greatly on a fast CUDA equipped GPU. This leads to my final puzzle piece of my PC build....the graphics card(s).

Which GPU will have the best performance when rendering with IRAY?

I'm either going to go with a three or four way setup using the 780ti or the newer Maxwell based GTX 980 cards. I'm having a tough time deciding between the two. The benefit of the newer 980 GPUs is that they are more efficient and have a 1gb more memory then the older 780ti's. But if the older 780ti are a large percentage quicker, I'll go that route.

Over at Maxforums forum there's a IRAY benchmarking thread but hasn't been updated with a lot of recent hardware.

http://www.maxforums.org/threads/iray_gpu_cpu_comparison_test/0001.aspx
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/23316655/iray_test_just_hit_render.zip

If anyone has a GTX 980/970 and runs 3ds max 2015 (with the latest update that supports Maxwell gpus). It will be interesting to see yours results.

http://www.nvidia-arc.com/products/mentalray/maxwell-gpu-support.html


Please post separate results of CPU, GPU(s), and combined CPU & GPU(s) times.


danke
-ty1er/

 

[Kippa]

You might be better off getting a cheap 1st generation Nvidia Titan (not the black one) if you can, purely for the reason of having more video ram. Having 3gb or 4gb for 3d rendering purposes might be cutting it a bit fine, with a 1st gen Titan you would get 6gb of video ram which would give you more latitude with regards to bigger complex models/scene renders.

 

[artvscommerce]

I would expect the 980 to perform similar to the Titan. So I would go with the 980 unless you are likely to be working with models that will utilize the additional memory on the Titan.

 

[Chamix]

I would personally go with the 780 ti, specially now that you can get bargains for used ones. I recently purchased a 980 ti and tested with the latest version of max 2015. It was quick, but for $700 I wasn't sure about the performance per dollar. I then was lucky to find both a 780 ti @ $250 and a 780 for $200 on Craigslist from different buyers. A STEAL!!! Bought them the same day! I then went ahead and test all 3 cards separately on an iray scene with motion blur millions of polygons.
980 ti: 1:26 - $700 w tax
780 ti: 1:28 - $250
780: 1:35 - $200
So I ran to micro center and returned the 980ti lol. Now I'm rendering almost twice as fast as a 980 ti and for a LOT less. I'm even consisting on picking up another 780 ti or just regular 780. The only issue is that I would need a new mother board,cpu and ram in order to accommodate more pci express.
Btw, on my test scene I made several copies of a highly detail car with interior, maybe 20 people characters from the populate tool all of them textured and the memory usage per card was only 1.4gb. That made my worries about rendering large scenes with 3gb cards go away. I don't really see myself rendering anything larger than my test and I had ram to spare.
I hope this helps somebody.

 

[tweakboy]

Oh sh*T is iraq ,,,,,,, whats going on, were being attacked

or or iris,, gg