I have two gtx 660s and i want to build a new system. I plan for 32 gb ram, ryzen 3900 but i don’t know if i should do two gpu like the gtx 980, or 1 new card like 2080. Is there any benefit to having two anymore? I’m kinda leaning toward 1 because i game a little sometimes and few games take advantage of sli anyway or so i hear. Any advice is appreciated. Thanks!
I would say always go for new card.
Since Nvidia just support blender fund.
There should be something new or optimization coming.
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Yep, to elaborate a bit on that:
Of course you still have all the benefits from two cards as it was the whole time.
The thing is in this case, that one 2080 will blow the other out of the water. You can always add a second one later. Or aim at two 2070 if that’s anyhow fitting into the budget. Although I’d advise you go for one 2080 for now. It’s a world between what you now have.
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Get two 2070 Supers if you can swing it.
If you game, then definitley a single RTX 2080 Super over even dual RTX 2070’s.
Unless you game 10% and render 90% fo the time, then the other way around would be better, only if you use Cycles for rendering. If you use Eevee, then definitely single card, as dual GPU’s are currently not supproted.
As mentioend, Nvidia and AMD fund developers, but it’s up to Ton to decide how that money is spent. Currently the Optix render option does give a near 2x render improvements for RTX cards over CUDA.
So definteily RTX if you render in cycles, Eevee again single card.
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Yeah i only game 10% nowadays. I didn’t know about the Optix I’ll have to look into that. Also i’m slow to convert to eevee so i still use cycles for everything. Thanks for the advice!
I’m thinking one 2080 looks like a winner so far. Thanks for the info!
Generally good advice as always. A little nitpick about Eevee and dual GPU. Please don’t forget about the workaround with two Blender instances for Eevee animations under Windows with NVIDIA cards. I am working on something for Linux, but it’s a bit early to make much noise about it.
What workaround? like opening blender twice and setting 1 card for each rendering different frames?
ah thanks!
I mention 2070 Supers above because anyone looking to build a multi-gpu workstation should not rule them out, unless their situation is carte blanche (then by all means 2080 Ti all the way). 2070 Supers are just a little behind 2080 Supers in terms of rendering horsepower, and at around $500 they are arguably the best render-bang you can get for your render-buck (if we are talking about new GPUs, that support OptiX). A 2070 Super yields a pretty damn impressive 220 in Octane’s Benchmark (way more scientific and precise than anything I have seen for Cycles or E-Cycles), which is just a wee bit behind the 2080 Super’s Octane Bench of 233. 2080 Ti gets a score of 302. So for less than a single 2080 Ti you could have two 2070 Supers with a score of 440, which would completely smoke a single 2080 Ti. I’m actually thinking of replacing my three 980 Ti Hybrids with 2070 Super Hybrids in the near future. We’ll see. It is nice that we have so many options. I could end up with either three 2070 Supers, three 2080 Supers, or three 2080 Ti. It is tempting at that price (about $570 for the hybrids). Of course the businessman in me knows that if I was racing to meet a deadline, I might end up cursing myself for not getting the 2080 Ti Hybrids… Though, ultimately, if GPUs are cranking often enough, they do eventually pay themselves. Sometimes very quickly. Even 2080 Ti. Time IS money yo!
2070 Super Octane Bench:
https://render.otoy.com/octanebench/results.php?v=4.00&sort_by=avg&filter=2070%20Super&singleGPU=0
2080 Super Octane Bench:
https://render.otoy.com/octanebench/results.php?v=4.00&sort_by=avg&filter=2080%20Super&singleGPU=0
2080 Ti Octane Bench:
https://render.otoy.com/octanebench/results.php?v=4.00&sort_by=avg&filter=2080%20Ti&singleGPU=0
yeah i looked at them after reading your comment. 8gb each. vs 11gb in 1 2080 had me very intrigued. Especially because I’ve ran out of memory on mine so that extra memory would be a bonus. and the same price. So that’s probably what I’ll do. Just got sad because i thought i could pull off my dream rig for 2k but doing PCpartpicker I’m realizing that it’s gonna be like 3k. 
lol Thanks for the info!
Dude, for those very rare occasions you hit a VRAM wall, you now have out-of-core rendering to the rescue, which uses system ram, and only renders somewhat slower. And you say 8GB is not enough. Are you aware that 2080s come with 8GB (just like 2070 Supers - that render a tineee bit slower)?.. You’d need a 2080Ti to get 11GB…
And if you really shop around for the various parts during Black Friday, which is just around the corner, you might be able to pull off the system you’re shooting for, around 2k…
i mean 8gb each card is nice. So if i get two cards 16gb vs one 2080 at 11gb with my budget as the constraint. Black Friday would be nice but i was kind of thinking about saving cash then opening an air miles credit card, buying everything at once then paying that off right away. There is like 40,000 bonus miles if you spend 2k in the first month. lol. Depends how much i could save on black friday tho and if the ryzen 3900 drops in price too because they are gonna release a new gen soon i think.
It doesn’t work that way CD… Don’t worry, you are far from the first to think that GPU vram is added together. This is a very common misconception. Scenes must entirely be loaded into each GPU. And if NVLink is now able to go bi-directional on RTX and can add memory together, that is news to me, if that is what you are talking about. I’m pretty sure that only Quadros have those bells/whistles. Someone correct me if I am wrong.
So for some big scene(eg.n 10 GB ram need), bigger memory should be better right? Since you cannot share vram
Yeah, more vram is always better. But one has to weigh just how often they are going to need 11GB versus how much pure render muscle (for a given budget) they want to stuff into available pci-e slots. In my case, I am a disciplined 3D artist who optimizes geo and textures and uses instancing as much possible. And I do not need to render 4k animations with all kinds of render layer passes for complex compositing. So for me, 8GB will likely be fine if I do indeed end up getting three 2070 Supers or three 2080 Supers.
I’m still not clear on what Christoph is planning to get. I read his posts a couple times…
I still don’t know what i’m going to get. Trying to educate my self on hardware. Its confusing comparing graphics cards. I guess my original question was “is one newer card like the 2080 better than 2 older cards like 980” Then i started looking at the 2070s and thought about increasing the budget to run 2 and then i wouldnt have to worry about old vs new.
Well, in that case, I definitely would say new. Here is the thing; I have always been an advocate of getting used GPUs off eBay etc (and often one gen back), and still am for students, folks down on their luck and whatnot… But OptiX is really a whole different ballgame altogether. Whether using E-Cycles or just plain Cycles, the OptiX advantage is something like double (cuts your renders in half, from non-OptiX renders). No kidding. Only RTX support OptiX (and possibly 1080Ti/1080, but to a lesser extent if I’m not mistaken - I haven’t seen anything solid on that). So I am telling you, as someone who has been in the GPU rendering game for seven years, I would personally find a way to spend $1k on my GPUs in the budget and get two 2070 Supers. Period. Good luck CD!