invest in VEGA or NVIDIA GPUs?

hi, i want to buy two GPUs for rendering in Cylces.
i know that VEGA is pretty fast in Cycles but they cost 100 Dollars over MSRP in my country. Vega64: 600 $ (with the lousy reference-cooler which i would have to replace) and 1080ti 720$.
I am considering 2x1080ti or 2xVega64 - can t decide. Any thoughts or recommendations?

Hi.

Nvidia cards are pretty good with Cycles, CUDA rendering is very well developed and things should just work for the most part. They are also efficient with power and heat.

AMD Vega however has an interesting feature that allows system RAM and even the SSD drive to lend memory to a scene (so you can render huge and heavily detailed scenes that would otherwise lead to out of memory errors on the 1080ti). The heavy development on Cycles OpenCL kernel also makes AMD a much better option than it used to be.

But if you’re going to get Vega, I would suggest the Vega56, it is cheaper, still fast, and still has that memory feature I mentioned.

Well, for 2xVega 64 gpus you’ll need a beefy psu too. Keep that in mind. I wouldn’t be surprised if two of these cards alone draw 700W+ during rendering (without taking into account the consumption of the rest of the system’s parts). So, an efficient psu in the 1000-1200W range would be my choice in this case. Overheating would be an issue too, so your thought on replacing the stock cooler with a custom one seems rational to me.

Thank you for the replies.

Which one you choose, team red or team green? :slight_smile:
I currently thinking to buy 4 GPU’s for my future threadripper build and also wondering what would be better for cycles vega64/FR or 1080 Ti? Also next year GTX 20series might be released.