Top GPU for Redshift, Octane and V-Ray in 2023

I bet you have once wondered which GPU you should use for your 3d rendering engines. Which one is the best in terms of raw power, rendering speed, cost efficiency, etc.? In this article, let’s explore in detail some of the top GPU for Redshift, Octane and V-Ray in 2023.

We will compare the latest consumer graphics cards like RTX3090/4090 with workstation cards like RTX A5000/A6000.

RTX4090, the latest GPU of Nvidia, is based on Ada Lovelace architecture, while RTX 3090, RTX A6000 and RTX A5000 are on the last generation Ampere architecture. The new architecture will introduce to you a new generation of RT cores for real-time ray tracing, Tensor cores for machine learning acceleration, and CUDA cores for basic graphics computations.

The clock frequency is for GPU clock speed, with higher means faster processing. RTX 4090 based clock and boost clock are higher than 2 GHz (2.23 and 2.52 GHz respectively), faster than any old Ampere architecture GPUs.

The graphics features of all four GPUs are kind of the same, with only RTX4090’s CUDA is 8.9, while the others are 8.6.

Come to the render config, you should pay attention to three different types of processing:

• • • • CUDA Cores (Shading units): more CUDA cores or shading units means faster processing of different aspects of the image.
      • Tensor cores can accelerate the speed of matrix multiplication. It has more applications in machine learning or deep learning, but it also affects the creation of 4K graphics or videos.
      • 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.

RTX4090 is on the next level, when its CUDA cores are about 2 times higher than RTX A5000, about 1.5 times higher than RTX 3090 and RTX A6000. Same results go for Tensor cores and RT cores.

Other things you should keep an eye on are TMUs and ROPs.

• • • • TMUs take textures and map them to the geometry of a 3D scene. More TMUs will mostly mean that texture information is processed faster.
      • The ROPs are responsible for some of the final steps of the rendering process, writing the final pixel data to memory and carrying out other tasks such as anti-aliasing to improve the look of graphics.

RTX4090 is performing great, while its TMUs is about 1.5-2 times greater than RTX 3090, A6000 and A5000. Its ROPs is about 1.5-1.9 times greater than the others.

The floating-point performance (TFLOPS) helps you determine the raw power of the GPU. And here, you can see a great improvement where RTX 4090 is 3 times higher than A5000, and about 2.1-2.3 times higher than A6000 and RTX3090 respectively.

In general, we can see that RTX4090 specification is so attractive and could outperform any other older Ampere architecture graphics cards such as RTX3090, A6000 and A5000. However, is it really faster in rendering? We would look into some benchmark tests of Redshift, Octane and V-Ray to have an answer.

Undoubtedly, RTX4090 is the fastest. The test is conducted by cgdirector.com, with RTX on. With the same amount of work, while RTX4090 finishes in 1 min 16 secs (76 seconds), A5000 could take 3 min 06 secs (186 seconds, about 2.5 times slower). A6000 is not clearly faster than A5000, as it takes 3 min 01 secs (181 seconds) to complete the work.

RTX3090 is surprisingly better than A6000. It only takes 2 min 42 secs (162 seconds), still faster than both A6000 and A5000, but about 2.1 times slower than RTX4090. It’s a great result, based on many tests we have explored earlier that Redshift on RTX4090 is only about 1.6-1.7 times faster than on RTX3090. Judging from that, it clearly says it depends on your project’s render settings that the speed could vary.

Once again, RTX4090 scores 1272 points, nearly double the score of RTX3090. The scores of RTX4090 is 2-2.1 times higher than A6000 and A5000, promising to have the processing and rendering speed faster than what you could expect from the old Ampere architecture GPU.

RTX3090 is still doing good, as the score is 661, higher than both A6000 and A5000, but the difference is not significant. It will still be a choice for anyone who doesn’t want to upgrade to RTX4090, but wants to find a decent graphics card.

It’s not surprising that RTX4090 is still the best for V-Ray rendering. While RTX A6000 only scores nearly 2000 (maybe about 1700 scores), RTX4090 could easily score more than 5500. RTX3090 performs well, scoring about 2100. Because RTX A6000 is the newer generation compared to RTX A5000, we can be sure that A5000 is still far behind the consumer cards.

These are the benchmark tests of V-Ray for RTX A5000 compared to RTX3090 and RTX4090. It’s safe to say that RTX3090 is about 10% faster than A5000, and RTX4090 could be 2x faster than A5000, although they have the same amount of VRAM.

According to the tests above, we can clearly say that RTX4090 is the best GPU for Redshift, Octane and V-Ray rendering. Released at the end of 2022, till now RTX4090 still is a beast in terms of rendering. The new Ada Lovelace architecture has improved a lot of the performance for RTX4090. The increase in tensor cores and RT cores also boost up the quality and capabilities of real-time rendering, while CUDA cores help to leverage the processing time. Many other specifications of RTX4090 is an upgrade of the old Ampere architecture GPU, making it the new king of the consumer graphics cards.

iRender is proud to introduce our remote workstation, from single to multiple RTX4090. We provide you supercomputers, with high-end specifications like AMD Ryzen™ Threadripper™ PRO 3955WX @ 3.9 – 4.2GHz or AMD Ryzen™ Threadripper™ PRO 5975WX @ 3.6 – 4.5GHz, RAM 256GB, Storage NVMe SSD 2TB. Most importantly, we always update to the latest GPU technology, with 1/2/4/6/8 x RTX3090/RTX4090.

You are free to install any 3d software or rendering engines, including Redshift, Octane and V-Ray on our remote servers, add your own license then render or modify your project by yourself.

Let’s see how our RTX4090 performs when rendering with Redshift, Octane or V-Ray:

iRender also provides you more services. We have a useful and free transferring tool named iRender drive. Our price is flexible with hourly rental which has a pay-as-you-go basis, daily/ weekly/ monthly subscription with discount from 10-20%. Plus, you have 24/7 support service via livechat with real humans who will support you whenever you encounter an issue.

Register an account today to experience our service. Or contact us via WhatsApp: (+84) 916806116 for advice and support.

Thank you & Happy Rendering!

Source: techpowerup.com, engineering.com, versus.com, techcenturion.com, h3platform.com, hostkey.com