Compare Nvidia and AMD GPU when rendering Blender

We all know that the biggest name in the GPU rendering market is Nvidia. However, through time, we still want to enlarge the providers of GPU to have more options. AMD is one of the name we’re often heard about and Blender is one of the few software support AMD cards. In this article, let’s have a look at some of the latest graphics cards of these two brands, then compare Nvidia and AMD GPU when rendering Blender.

In this comparison, I will take some of the factors to compare. They are: floating-point performance, the shading units, RT cores, the clock speed and memory bandwidth. I will compare the most powerful graphics cards on both sides: Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 and AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX.

The floating-point performance (TFLOPS) helps you determine the raw power of the GPU. Here we see RTX 4090 is 82.52 TFLOPS, while RX 7900 XTX is only 61 TFLOPS. So in theory, RTX 4090 is about 1.34 times stronger than RX 7900 XTX.

CUDA Cores (Shading units) determine processing of different aspects of the image is fast or not. While RTX 4090 has 16384 cores, RX 7900 XTX only has 6144 cores. The difference is big, where RTX 4090 has more cores than RX 7900 XTX for 2.7 times.

Come to RT cores. RT cores is responsible for Real-time ray tracing, a technology that mimics the physical behavior of light rays, delivering a higher-quality and more photorealistic results than other technology. More RT cores means the GPU can do the math of ray-tracing quicker than the others.RX 7900 XTX doesn’t support ray tracing, so nothing to compare here.

The clock frequency is for GPU clock speed, with higher means faster processing. RTX 4090 based and boost clock are 2.23 and 2.52 GHz, both are higher than the clock of   RX 7900 XTX.

The memory bandwidth will determine how fast it can move data from/to memory to the computation cores. Here RTX 4090 still outperforms RX 7900 XTX, with 5% faster in the speed of memory transfer.

Overall, we see RTX 4090 and RX 7900 XTX only have the same Video memory. Other than that, RTX 4090 is stronger on paper.

We come to the real test on Blender to find out if Nvidia GPU is better than AMD GPU or not (Benchmark and real scene).

In Blender Benchmark Geomean, RTX 4090 scores highest, being the best graphics card in term of performance on Blender. It scores 3877, is about 3.4 times higher than RX 7900 XTX. Other Nvidia graphics cards, either from new series 4000 or old series like RTX 3000, also have a good performance, when RTX 4080, 3090/3080 Ti and 3090/3080 still score better than the best one of AMD RT 7900 XTX, while their VRAM is the same or less than 24GB.

Come to Blender test scene, here the tests are made on Blender 3.4.0. The scenes are Classroom, Junkshop and Monster.

In the first scene Classroom, RTX 4090 scores 3020 while RX 7900 XTX scores 856. The AMD card is ~3.5 times slower to render the scene with the same settings.

In the Junkshop scene, RTX 4090 score a little bit lower (only 2989), but still performed good. RX 7900 XTX is a little bit better in this scene, scores 956. However, the AMD card is still far behind Nvidia card (about ~3.1 times slower) when render the scene. And Once again, the best graphics card from AMD still performs worse than all Nvidia graphics cards.

Come to the third scene Monster, RX 7900 XTX now shows its ability, as it scores better than Titan RTX. However, the score 1801 is not enough to surpass other graphics cards from Nvidia like RTX3000 and RTX 4000 series. In this scene, RTX 4090 shows its superiority, scores 6457, about 3.6 times faster than RX 7900 XTX.

In every scene, we see that RX 7900 XTX improves a lot, and is better than Titan RTX in 1 test scene. However, RTX 4090 is still dominating and moves forward so far that AMD has to work a lot to close the gap. Not only the new series RTX 4000 with new architecture, but also old architecture cards like RTX 3000 and have 12GB VRAM like RTX 3080/3080Ti can easily beat AMD card in terms of rendering in Blender.

This is a head to head comparison between Nvidia RTX 4090 and AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX. With its longer time in supporting GPU rendering in general, with a lot of improvement and initiatives in rendering technology, Nvidia still leads the game here. However, we see AMD participating and Blender, along with many other software, slowly supporting it, that will push Nvidia to keep improving more in the future. Now, there’s no monopoly of Nvidia in the market, and we as the buyer have more options to think about.

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Let’s see how our RTX4090 performs when rendering with Blender:

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Thank you & Happy Rendering!

Source: tomshardware.com