Hi,
I am thinking of upgrading my RTX 2060 Super to RTX 3070 but then I thought what if I invest to E-CYCLES instead ans save money. I primarily use Blender with CYCLES for archviz and visualisation, bit of modelling here and there. The difference is x2 the money if I go for RTX 3070.
Any thoughts ?
Thanks T.
E-Cycles. And add a used 2070 Super if you can get a good deal. I have three 2070 Supers, E-C and B-Renderon… That is a pretty formidable combo.
Do you do anything else graphical? Games? Video editing? The 3070 would work for more than just improving blender render times.
Interesting proposition. Investing around extra ÂŁ75 over RTX 2060 Super. What the gains do you get Optix Cycle vs E-cycles?
That’s the thing. I rarely play and don’t do video editing. I also do Photoshop but it merely uses my current card though. Do you know by any chance if Blender 2.90 has any significant improvements on Optix CYCLES?
Why don’t you try Octane render? For a single GPU is free and it’s way faster than Cycles or even E-Cycles. And you could use your money to upgrade to a new rtx 3070
I was briefly reading about Octane the other day. How stable and convenient is it?
It is stable and it is fast, incredibly fast. The material nodes of the Blender plugin aren’t that much different from Cycles, you can learn them quickly. And it has some features I haven’t seen in other render engines, like displacement without the need of subdividing the geometry, for example. Plus, they are working on a new path tracing kernel (called “Brigade”) which will be able to achieve real full path tracing in real time, you can have a look here: https://vimeo.com/showcase/7400404
Anyway, as I said for a single GPU is free, you can download the Blender plugin from here.
Very curious . Will check it out when have time.The fact I only use single GPU right now it’s very tempting. I don’t even mind paying if any extra horse power needed in the future))
I take it this demo is viewport view right? Looks quit natural to my eye. And…According to Nvida 3070 should surpass 2080TI!
The good thing is I don’t have to rush since 3070 is not out until mid of October. I can sit down and make up my mind while drinking coffee 
I abandoned Octane for E-Cycles after 7 years of use. This was complete bullshit about Octane being faster. The opposite is true last time I checked. And Octane has its own materials, so all mats need to be converted. No thank you. I am so done with Octane. I am not saying I could never be brought back to the dark side, but not right now or anytime soon.
And I was NOT saying replace the 2060 with a 2070 Super, I was suggesting it be added to workstation, if OP can do two GPUs.
I was wondering if anyone had the experience of Norka. I am on that fence right now, trying to justify Octane for Blender. I have a version for other software but not willing to keep up on the sub.
Ecycles keeps you, mentally, in the Blender mindset. Octane is awesome, yes, worth the price and all, sure.
For the OP, I would say get ecycles and start from there. I am reticent to say stack cards in your box. I’d say bide your time and get the 30xx. The future-proofing it theoretically offers can’t be beat.
And since it is free (Like the first hit of a drug, lol) give Octane a whirl. See how it behaves on your system compared to ecycles.
Robert
It says a lot you went for E-cycles. I guess workflow is more straightforward. Not sure if you missed it or I didn’t ask clearly enough but could you provide me rough idea how much time you would save E-Cycle render vs Cycles in blender? Do you use Optix or CUDA?
I have Mini ATX case and adding another card is not an option.
I believe E-C is more than twice as fast as stock Cycles. I use Optix version. That sucks you can only do one GPU.
I was so frustrated with Jules, Lino, et al, at Otoy for not trying harder to somehow make PrBSDF work in Octane engine that I jumped right on E-C (like 18 months ago), and since many of the extra bells and whistles that Octane has were pretty much never used by me in my workflow, I have never looked back.
But folks ultimately need to make their own decisions. There are some things that Octane can do that is truly incredible. And the displacements in GPU is something to behold. But I honestly was hardly ever using many of the extra goodies. And once I got into a groove with E-C, I have effing loved my workflow, like never before. I was a LightWave user for many years too. I am not even going to bother to expand on that. All that shit is in my rearview mirror.
Edit: Oh yeah, and another major factor is this: It can take eons to get new Blender builds of Octane and they are usually only “stable” releases, which can be pretty long-in-the-tooth and not have newer features… E-Cycles dev Mathieu bangs out both stable and beta releases every week or two for the most part. THAT. ROCKS.
Definitely RTX 3070. E-cycles patches will be shared to Blender Development team a year after releasing the e-cycles patches. So now you’ll have higher speeds, and in a year you’ll have more.
I went the opposite way. I’ve been working with E-Cycles for months and of course it wasn’t that bad, it was faster than Cycles… but when my scene became bigger in textures numbers and polygons E-Cycles just couldn’t keep up with it. So I tried Octane. I manually converted hundred of materials and recreated them from scratch and it took months, of course, but it was my fault. Anyway when I finished… oh, boy… the two render engines couldn’t even be compared! E-Cycles version of my scene rendered 1 sample per second, more or less. Octane rendered 20/30 samples per second. And it had a real time depth of field in the viewport. And displacement without subdivision need. This was my experience.
What’s your problem with Jules and Lino and anybody else at Otoy? Everyone is really willing to help and I personally write to Lino everytime I need to understand something I couldn’t understand. By the way Octane builds are quite frequent, as you can see in the official thread july 23, july 28, august 30…
I don’t really have anything massive going on at the moment. No animation though. Thoughtful Blender use and E-Cycles and maybe maybe even 3070 should work a charm for me.
What do most create in Blender?
Or you could check out Octane, like right now, keep the money, don’t buy another GPU and also take a look at Luxcore which I think can produce nicer results than Cycles in some cases (especially with Archviz)
After you played with these 2 render engines you could make a much more informed decision.
I also dont get how people think that Ecycles is anywhere near as fast as Octane. Sure the sampling is somewhat the same speed but Octane just procduces a way cleaner images given the same amount of samples in virtually all cases i tested. You also get way fater scene start ups and a proper cache.To top it off it is free and pretty nicely integrated.