I researched the best GPU for Blender as I’m planning to upgrade my PC because I’ve been having trouble with slow rendering and viewport performance. I’ve been working with Blender more lately, especially with larger and more demanding projects, and I wanted to find a GPU that can handle rendering, modeling, and animation without constant performance issues. I went through reviews and discussions from trusted sources like Blender forums, Reddit threads, and hardware review sites, and after comparing many options these two kept coming up as the top choices:
However, I’m having trouble deciding which one would be better for me and I would love to get your expert advice. I’m hoping maybe some Blender users or people who have upgraded their GPU specifically for Blender can also share their experience.
I mainly want good Cycles rendering performance, smooth viewport performance, and something that will remain useful for future Blender projects. I’m not sure whether it’s worth spending more on the RTX 4080 Super or if the RTX 4070 Super would be enough for my needs.
Which one would you personally recommend for Blender, and are there any other GPUs I should consider instead? Any suggestions or advice would be appreciated.
Blender publishes benchmarks for different GPUs which is really helpful to understand their relative performance.
I have the RTX 4080 (not super) and it works really well for my purposes. I “upgraded” from a MacBook Pro M1 and the difference was enormous. The 4080 can handle almost anything if you take care to not exceed the available memory.
Whether the 4070 super is enough depends a lot on what you are doing with Blender and how much you are willing to spend.
The best GPU for Blender is easy, it’s a RTX 5090 (or it’s Pro equivalents).
If that’s outside the budget, then you more down the stack, 5080, 5070 Ti then the 4080’s and the like.
Keep in mind tho, the 4080 Super is already 2 and half years ago, based on an architecture that’s almost 4 years old and have not been made for a bit of time now, so you are buying used.
Hello !
I can’t say for these GPU, personally I upgraded this year from a GTX 1080 8GB to a RTX 5060 Ti 16GB and it’s more than fine.
I spend less than 700€ and while it’s less powerful than both GPU you picked I highly doubt those are as twice as fast even though they are twice as expensive.
You can look at my portfolio to see projects I’ve made with my 1080 basically everything but two recent projects I made this year.
That said, even if I didn’t felt blocked by my GPU, I indeed feel more comfortable now and I can care a bit less about optimizations. But in the meantime it’s very easy to bring down any GPU to its knees if you don’t optimize your scenes when they are complex.
If you work clever you can probably pull out amazing images with average or low end GPU. Without that even with best hardware you won’t get very far.
Also I tend to favor GPU memory even though with cycles texture cache you have less to worry, I’m using eevee most of the time and this is where I spend most of the time making sure I can fit all my image and geometry in the VRAM.
Keep in mind also, that all geometry evaluation is done on the CPU so you need a good balance there when modeling especially if you deal with heavy stuff and modifiers.
It’s also worth noticing that studios can’t afford to pay 2000€ for every workstation so most of what you see in movies/series is likely to be done on average grade hardware. Even if they might have beefy PC for simulation or access to a renderfarm for rendering so it’s not a fair comparison.
My point is , obviously you need good tools to work, but it always goes down to skill and good methodology and counting on just hardware update might feel underwhelming : in animation if you are at 2fps upgrading might give you a 3 or 4 time boost but you’ll only get to 8fps, maybe 12 but far from 25 or 50…
I’m using an RTX3090, which does an admirable job, and which I bought on eBay a couple of years ago for around £600. However, even second hand, they now seem to be £1,500 - £2,000, and later models (RTX4090 or 5090) are way out of my budget comfort, so I’ll be sticking with the 3090.
MichaelColina
(The "Mr. Polygon Punisher" is your)
8
Same upgrade i did this year, but coming from a GTX 1070.
Same because a 1070 or 1080 nowadays is very slow for blender raytracing or path tracing engines and with a newer generation (other than more VRAM) GPU you simply can’t go back. And yes scene/asset management/optimization still matters even with more VRAM capacity. And yes cycles texture cache surely is a huge game changer so to call it to save more memory.
Yeah the newer or older GPUs don’t exactly benefit the modelling, modifier stack, geometry nodes, and other non-GPU threaded tasks, so a powerful CPU processor matters there. There is also exceptionally GPU Subdivision, which does take VRAM to run it, and now the Compositor by default with GPU processing enabled in newer blender versions
