I currently run several machines including nodes on a render farm a single 4K image might take 1-2 minutes to render on average upgrading to 4090 might give me a machine that can render a frame in 15-30 seconds maybe a little less still having extra computers to do more rendering in the background.
I know AMD has a bad performance history in blender, but it seems they are doing a lot of improvement under the hood and I wonder even if the performance would be 20% lower how would it stack up and affect my experience vs Nvidia?
Currently an rtx 3090 is 1300 euro. The 7900 xtx might be the same or lower with the performance veering more towards the 4090 then the 3090. Given it has the same specs in Vram I might veer towards buying the XTX.
Any thoughts about what and if the changes to AMDs drivers RDNA3 etc. might make them worth buying?
And this graph doesn’t even include the 4000 generation for NVIDIA, which is twice as fast as the 3090s. Long story short- AMD GPUs are terrible for Blender, as things currently are it’s not worth it, and nothing has been announced that seems like the best AMD generation will make up the gap
Things are very different if someone is not using Cycles. Let’s not forget that Cycles is only a small part of Blender. If your main work is modelling, rigging, texturing, simulation, animation, game assets creation etc, etc then Radeon can be much efficient and affordable choice.
First why did you mentioned DLSS3 and FSR3 in the title? Those are technologies dedicated to game engines, not rendering engines, and will only confuse people here on this forum as both are not used in Blender at all.
When comparing performance you are using gaming performance estimations, which for rendering in Blender can mean nothing - you didn’t specify what render engine you are using.
AMD has generally good record with how advertised performance looks compared to real one, but using marketing material as your only datapoint is pretty big risk if you want to spend a lot of money. I’m talking about RDNA3 7xxx here. Wait until those GPUs come out and independent benchmarks are published.
@joseph hit the proverbial nail with how things look right now (at least regarding Cycles) but he didn’t mentioned at least two things that might be relevant here:
AMD performance gap is mostly due to the fact that in Cycles NVIDIA have hardware RT and AMD don’t. AMD is working on this and the target is Blender 3.5. Speculating about future performance is pointless IMHO.
4090 might be a risky investment because of the whole melting-cable-connector drama. Personally I’m not touching that thing (NVIDIA/Intel/AMD regardless) until PCI-SIG release any concluding statement about the new standard.
