Single RTX 2060 Super or Dual RX 580... or maybe one RTX 2070 Super, suggest please

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#1

Hi

This is my first post here. I’m expecting that the community’s experience will help me.

I’ve been using Blender & Autodesk Fusion 360 as my main 3D tools. I use these to create exhibition designs, packaging designs and retail display units.

So far, since such modelling/rendering are not very hardware demanding, I was doing ok on my 6 yr old laptop (Lenovo Ideapad Y500) with Core i7 3632QM, 16 GB RAM, 500GB SSD and 2GB Nvidia GT 750m. However, now I’m gradually moving into a bit more demanding tasks which require animation for my kind of work. Earlier I was only rendering static scenes.

Now, I want to do some fluid animations, a bit of fire/smoke etc so that along with my static rendering I can also give to my clients some animated stuff as add-on to the work I do. E.g. Packaging design that starts with an animation to build the mood, or an exhibition design that has some water/ fire show animated.

Therefore, I am in the market for a new system. I was considering a laptop again (Acer Nitro 7, i7 9750H, 6GB GTX 1660ti, 8GB RAM, 1TB HDD+512GB SSD) for about $1200.

And for the same price (~$1200) a desktop with Ryzen 7 3700X, 32GB RAM, 1TB HDD+240GB SSD and a good GPU can also be had. I’ve already configured most of the system, but I’m undecided on GPU. For about $400 (± $20) I can get 2 8GB RX 580s or 1 RTX 2060 Super.

Or, if a choose a Ryzen 7 2700X, then with the money saved on CPU, I can get a RTX 2070 Super.

Could anyone please help me in this regard. My max spending limit is $1200.

Thanks.

#2

Hi,
definatly go with Nvidia. I recently changed radeon 7 that i bought year ago for Blender with my new rig. Yesterday I installed rtx 2070 and difference is massive. I was suprised becouse Radeon 7 was a tier higher card with much more rough power on paper… but really OpenCl is old and unoptimaised.
Performance in viewport is massivly better with Rtx, and rendering on Gpu optix is blowing performance up… still not full featured but CUDA is still better than OpenCL. On top of that during rendering with Radeon PC was intensivly unresponsive and I though that it has to be becouse of render on GPU( almost bought second AMD card…ufff:)), but no… rtx manage to render on single GPU while maintaining fluent viewport and overall good responsivnes.
Rtx 2070 vs 2060 will be much better in terms of performance but will also have extra 2gb ram that can make a difference in big scenes. So consider saving up some more cash for that.
In case of cpu I think that 3gen Ryzen is best option becouse of high single thread performance. I got 1st gen threadripper and now I see that is not the best choice for Blender becouse most of process except render, cant utilize every thread, therefore single thread performance matters a lot.
Higher model is better of course I personally would grab 3900X.
Finally if you consider laptop, there is only one case for that choice and this is when you need mobility if not you’ll be much better with PC. For that money you can’t buy decent productivity laptop.
Hope this tips will help buying satisfing rig :slight_smile: Good luck!

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#3

Thanks, _Beastic

#4

Y5xx with dual 755Ms was my first laptop when I started CGI, loved it :slight_smile:

I currently use a Clevo Laptop with 6700HQ and GTX1060.
The desktop has 1700X and 2080TI + 4 x 2070S. It previously had 1080TI + 1070TI + 2x1070

The RTX cards can use Optix API and perform much better than GTX. Say RTX2070 is around %25 faster than GTX 1070 in games. But with Optix, the speed difference is up to 3 times - depending on scene elements-
Here is a good link to compare and I can say I have similar results.
https://openbenchmarking.org/result/1911251-HU-BLENDER2818&obr_sor=y

You should first decide how much mobility you need.
RTX has huge benefit but a laptop with one of these start at $1750.

As to RAM, have you checked how much is currently used? I doubt 16GB will hardly be used for the work you describe. You could save some monye there and upgrade later if required.

If you are looking into renderign animations and wish to keep sequence renders, 1TB might be insufficient in a few months. Consider at least 2TB for project files.

#5

I have three EVGA 2070 Super Hybrids. They are the shizz. Do get a 2070 Super if you can.

#6

One RTX 2070 super or better.

#7

As others stated… RTX 2070 Super any day. with Optix, it will be nearly 1.8x faster on averange compared to Cuda. so it easly outperforms AMD’s offerings

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#8

Is Cycles utilizing the new features in RTX arc?

#9

Optix denoise, yes. Note sure about ray intersection calc acceleration.

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