Hi, my GPU currently is RTX 4060 8GB
Recently I’m working on archviz projects, and obviously my GPU ran out of memory because of the nature of archviz projects being large in scale.
So I’m planning to upgrade my GPU, my choices are between RTX 4060ti 16GB and RTX 3080ti 12GB (secondhand, priced the same as 4060ti in my country).
The 3080ti is obviously faster but has less VRAM, so is it worth it to go for the slower 4060ti but with enough VRAM?
It would be great if you could suggest me which one should I go for.
From my experience and the projects you’ve described I would go with the 4060ti 16 GB. The reason is simple. The other might be faster sometimes but if you run out of VRAM you get stopped dead in your tracks (almost) and you’ll spend a bunch of time trying to re-optimize your scene (your time by the way, not computer time).
So to recap, CAN do but slower (4060ti 16GB) or CANNOT do at all sometimes (3080ti). The little bit of speed difference in my opinion isn’t that important.
I have a 4060ti 16GB and I love it. I often run near the limit of 16GB so I would not want less. I don’t find it slow otherwise.
But the blender open data suggests that the 3080ti posts higher score than 4060ti. I don’t fully understand how the scoring works in the open data, but I see bigger numbers so I assume it’s faster. Lol
My friend wanted it so much so I guess I’ll sell it to him, idk.
Downgrading the GPU generation would imo only make sense if the older GPU had significantly more ram. 16 or more GB would make sense.
if its just a ~ couple hundred MBs missing, using multiple GPUs could be also helpful.
(if your cpu has an iGPU) it could be used for displaying the opend Blender project and the GPU for rendering the scene could be sufficient.
you could also use automatic optimizations in your scene via Addons, a quick search gave out those two examples;
If you can stretch the budget a bit, my advice would be for the 4070 Ti Super.
That should be around 15-20% faster then the 3080Ti (while using less power) and has 16GB VRAM. So all in all it should serve you well for some time to come.
I do industrial animations once in a while and importing from Solidworks can result in high poly counts. I also do some nature scenes for fun. I’m not a power user but I love having lots of VRAM.
As others above, I also recommend the memsaver addon. It seems to cut my VRAM use roughly in half most of the time. It’s super easy to use and very quick. In fact, you may want to try that before buying a new GPU and see if you really need and new one
