1080 Ti and underperforming rendering

Hi
Recently I bought my GTX 1080 Ti and I was really amazed by gaming performance but I mostly bought it for cycles rendering, however it struggles with that. I had a GTX 690 and it was rendering everything really damn fast.

Here’s someone else’s test of GTX 690 rendering that BMW scene in 36 seconds:

Now my GTX 690 took pretty much the same amount of time on the BMW, but my new and horribly expensive GTX 1080 Ti takes 2 minutes and 20 seconds.

Generally Blender seems to render everything slightly slower with it. Why could this happen? Is it due to some driver issues is it due to the GPU being really new or something?

I also read something that Nvidia was handicapping GPUs since 5xx series to sell their quadros better, maybe that makes some sense?

Are there any plans for some better Pascal support in Blender? Since at the moment it’s just so bad if a 5 year old GPU renders much faster than one of the best consumer grade 2017 GPUs.

Thanks! :slight_smile:

Edit update:

Clean driver reinstall doesn’t help
Tried rendering on 2.78 that doesn’t help either
I seem to be not the only one with this issue. Here’s a video demonstrating someone’s benchmark and it’s also slow as hell. https://youtu.be/xap9R5L7N1A
I’ve tried deleting the drives with DDU in safe mode and reinstalling them
Updating BIOS
Remounting the GPU
Trying out various power connection combinations (using different cables)
nothing so far has helped at all.

Couple of things there.

  1. That’s two 690 cards, not a single one.
  2. That’s the old single bmw scene , not the standard double bmw scene.

the BI has the 1080ti clocked at 72 seconds for the double bmw scene. You can find comparisons between the various cards as run by the developers them selves here

also note they are using a daily build, also in the comments of this postsomeone seems to suggest that the perf of the 1080 is indeed poor on windows, but much faster on linux, probably worth looking into

No, the video features a single 690, which is a single card, but yes, it has two GPU’s on it.

However the 1080Ti is a single gpu card and the only full-die/high-end gpu of it’s generation so it would be fairer to compare it to a 680 which is a gtx 6x0 series single full sized/high-end gpu card.

Thanks for the replies guys, I didn’t notice the scene update. Do you think that the performance of the new card will improve a lot with updates?

So the 1080Ti is supposed to be 1min 12s in the BMW scene according to the devs’ benchmarking? That’s weird since it’s almost double that in my case and the benchmarks I saw on youtube. I’m using the daily build, newest Nvidia drivers.

@ArasTM You must check with more complex scenes. I had the same problem when I bought my 1080 ti. With simpler scenes the difference with my old card (GTX770) was disapointing, but when I rendered some scenes with volumetrics, DOF and complex shaders you really get the maximum performance of this card.

Run some other, gaming benchmark and see if performance holds up there. Run GPU-Z and look for anything suspicious while Blender is rendering. What is your CPU? Does the bvh build or the upload to the card take a long time? Did you place the card in the correct pci slot? Does it get enough power?

Just some toughts off the top of my head.

Hi, Hovercraft, yes gaming is amazing on the card, it’s placed in the same slot and gtx 690 used more power so it’s definitely okay now. My CPU is i7 6700 and bvh building only takes a couple of seconds. What’s weird with running these blender render tests is that only approx 60% of my gpu is being used. Also overclocking it doesn’t seem to speed anything up so I’d would definitely love to get some clarification that this is a blender issue and will be fixed sometime … Thanks for your reply :))

does anyone else have this same problem?

Well, I’ve got an 1070 and it renders the double BMW time in 55 seconds or so? So there is definitely something off. And seeing these are the same architecture I don’t think it’s an issue with the 1080Ti in general. Maybe try the card in a different computer?

Yes that’s really weird, I might try something like that. I still think it should be something with drivers and software. What’s your bledner’s version, what’s your driver version?

Current-ish master, driver is 387.92

Mine is newer a bit, I don’t think that it could cause the issue, could it? I’ll try reinstalling all the drivers, will post results, thanks for the instant replies :slight_smile:

Just the same thing. I did a clean driver reinstall, nothing changed. Around 2 mins 20 seconds for that double BMW scene still :frowning:

ArasTM, do you have both cards installed?

Maybe this makes no sense, but do you have the 1080Ti installed in a PCI-E 8X instead of the main 16X port?

Hi, juang3d, I don’t think that’s the case. I only have one card installed and it’s in the 16x port. Thanks for the suggestion tho

Okay an update, I’ve tried deleting the drives with DDU in safe mode and reinstalling them, updating BIOS, remounting the GPU, trying out various power connection combinations (using different cables), nothing so far has helped at all.

Could you try the cards one by one with the following scene using 2.79 official release?

You make sure you have correctly selected each card from User Preferences > System.

Hmm, this is weird, I got 1:41 for GTX 1080 Ti on that scene. That seems to be right about the expectations. Perhaps I got something wrong earlier I don’t know.

Hoverkraft, are you sure that you rendered that scene in 55s?

There is another very important thing with BMW scenes. In addition to what has already been mentioned about an old scene containing only one car, there are two versions of the scene with two cars. The first original published in the forum by Mike Pan, download here:
https://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?239480-2-7x-Cycles-benchmark-(Updated-BMW)

Then the blender.org published the same scene but using much more sample rate, so it takes more time to render. (Yes, this has made things very confusing for users)
So if you see short times out there, it is very likely that users are using original scene from this forum.

Damn, I thought about that! Thanks so much for clearing things up! I really appreciate it :slight_smile: