The main features of E-Cycles:
- 1.7x to 2.4x faster rendering with CUDA without tricks, up to 4x faster with tricks see E-Cycles - Faster cuda rendering
- 1.15x to 1.65x faster with OSL on CPU
- about 1.15x faster with OpenCL
- Auto-tile-size
- Support per Email and PM
- New features every month
- Everything will be submitted for inclusion in master in one year, so you help make Blender better.
Just a quick comparison:
- If you put 100$ in your renderer to have it 2x faster, you spare in your case more than 2000$ today and your next upgrade, because you renderer is always 2x faster, you can again spare more than 2000$. So after 1 upgrade, you would have spared more than 4000$
- If you put all in hardware, 5690$ in your case, you have your render as fast this time (also Cycles doesn’t scale perfectly linearly, so it will be more like 1.90x faster depending on the scene), but next time, to keep the boost, you will again need this huge budget. So it will cost again 5690$. And on top of that, as already mentioned, you must regularly switch between SLI for games and non-SLI for Cycles, I’m not sure the connectors are made for regular plug/removal and it’s cumbersome.
Total cost in hardware + software scenario : 2850+100, then 2850 = 5790 $
Total cost in hardware only scenario : 5690x2 = 11380 $