Lobo3433 posted at 9:53PM Tue, 20 August 2019 - #4359953

Thanks for the info I was and still leery about needing to create an account with OTOY and using a custom build of Blender I am funny that way plus for my current learning style Cycles and EEVE seem to fulfill my needs plus I am still using a GeForce GTX 980 Ti GPU RAM 6 GB I plan on upgrading later this year to an RTX card have not decided on which on since I find it a little bit surprising that my GTX 980 has 2816 CUDA Cores and most of the new RTX I have seen do not come with that many CUDA Cores so still saving my pennies till the right one catches my attention

Yeah, the GTX 980ti is second only to the GTX1080ti and Titan XP in the number of CUDA cores. However, when it comes to CUDA enabled render speed, there's more to consider. Each CUDA core also has a base and boost clock speed, as well as bandwidth speed. For example, the GTX 690 and the 780ti both have more CUDA cores than your 980ti, but the 690 only has a base clock speed of 915, and the 780ti has clock speed of 875. Your 980ti has a base clock of 1000. So if you do the math on all these cards, your 980ti would outperform the 780ti, even though the 780ti has more cores. Another thing to consider is memory. There's a big difference in performance between a card with only 2 to 4gb of Vram compared to a card with 8gb of Vram. Remember you can't render what can't be loaded.

As far as RTX is concerned, most of the RTX line is going to outperform the older GTX line when you consider many of the variables, including the newer Turing architecture. The Turing architecture does things that the previous generations of GPU's didn't. It takes advantage of multiple types of specialized processor cores, including the accelerated use of new RT cores, which GTX cards do not have. It's true that currently there aren't many games or software applications which are programmed to use the RT cores yet, but it's coming to Blender soon. They are working on it now. See this link: Accelerating Cycles using NVIDIA RTX.

This means that very soon down the road, we will have another option besides CUDA in Blender. An option which they have already tested to make Cycles perform even better than CUDA cores alone. So, soon the question isn't going to be how many CUDA cores we have, but rather which RTX card has the most RT cores. Granted, neither CUDA nor RT is useful right now in Eevee, but somewhere down the line raytracing will also find its way into Eevee, and at that point RT cores will matter there too. So I think the investment in RTX from GTX is a good one for the near future. Regardless what gamers are saying about the value of an RTX card for games, the real impact and benefit of RTX will make itself very clear to people in the VFX and 3d graphics industry perhaps even before 2020.

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