GTX 980 VS RTX 3090 - CUDA - OPTIX in Blender - 2023

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This is my first Blender Benchmarks video, between GTX 980 - RTX 3090 in CUDA and OPTIX.
let’s see how much the difference is between GTX 980 and RTX 3090.
Main Render and Viewport in Blender 3.4.1

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RTX 3090 has median score of 6000 while 980 has median score of 391 score on https://opendata.blender.org/

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Yes, that’s a big difference, and besides, I was curious to see Optix worked on the GTX 980, but it made rendering times worse most of the time. in my experience, it doesn’t work on GTX GPUs.

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Hardware without dedicated RT cores tend to perform worse in RT tasks.

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yes, exactly. but I wonder why this option is not disabled with GTX GPUs.I was curious about that is this Optix can be at least 5% faster than Cuda for GTX GPUs.
but in my experience, as you said made render time even worse.

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OptiX is a RT library aka the software. To run fast it needs dedicated hardware for it → RT cores. If this hardware does not exist then OptiX runs on CUDA cores only.
At least that’s how I understand it.

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It seems reasonable.
Thanks for the information.

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probably the 3090 is better

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I did much the same tests when I updated from a GTX 1070 Ti to a RTX 3080 Ti a couple of months ago.

And yeah, OptiX on non-RTX cards is basically always slower. But once you have a RTX card, the performance difference is just massive, even compared to CUDA on the same card (which I also tested).

The whole RT thing may be a bit iffy with gamers (depending on the game, settings used, speed of the card, etc, etc), but for us with Blender and Cycles it’s been nothing but a massive win.

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yes, definitely
you can watch how much the difference they have

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nice video.
you even achieved better results in render time than me.
maybe it’s because of recording video or
my old CPU Ryzen 1700 ( bottleneck PC problem )

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Thanks.

Likely a bit of both, all my render tests where done with the PC doing nothing else, it was a pure GPU test, so yeah, recording the video at the same time likely didn’t help.

And yes, my 5900X would be a little faster then the old 1700, haha, so I have have gained a second or 2 in the initial build/prep time.

Still, you have a 3090, so your set for sometime to come now, can just upgrade around it.

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for next I should upgrade the CPU to something 5900 or 5950. but for now, I should stick to the old 1700 :sweat_smile:.
by the way, up to where I know the AM4 socket will have no more CPUs anymore the last one is 5800X3d.

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Yeah, that will likely be about the last one released for the AM4 platform. Chances are you maybe better off with the 5900x or 5950x, I don’t think the extra 3D cache of the 5800X3D makes a lot of difference to Blender.

Having said that, if you currently have a 1700, the motherboard maybe too old to update to a 5900x, you’d have to check to see how far the BIOS was updated too.

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Thanks for the information.

according to the official Asus website, 5900x and 5950x need 8503 bios version,
and I did upgrade the motherboard bios to 8601. I think it will work

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UPDATE, it’s a little off-topic. but it’s maybe useful.
As you read my previous posts, I wanted to upgrade my mainboard ( Asus Crosshair Vi Hero ) Bios to
8601.
after upgrading to the version that Asus officially released.
my Pc worked well for just 2-3 days.
but after that, problems started with the flakiness mouse, then a laggy screen and voice in watching videos, very unstable even couldn’t handle showing a simple video.
and all of the fans worked at the highest speed ( just the CPU fan worked correctly ) at the end windows crashed many times and faced BSODs, I faced much time with this problem.

after searching on the net I find out the exact same problem happens to many people, which upgraded to the 8601 Bios Version.
this version ( 8601) doesn’t work correctly on ( Crosshair Hero Vi ) and the latest stable Bios version is 8101.

I found out that Aura and AIsuite don’t work in this Bios version and the setup.exe can’t run to install the AIsuite program which causes high fan speed.
I decide to downgrade to Bios 8101 version. after downgrading.
AIsuite and Aura installed and up to now everything working the same as before.

conclusion: If you have the same mainboard as my mainboard.
do not upgrade the bios to the 8601 version.it’s very unstable and without this bios version or any newest stable bios version,
I think can not use 5900 and 5950 CPUs.
hope they release a new stable version in the future.