July 20, 2015
Best GPU for Octane? Really?
The GTX 980 Ti is an outstanding pro media graphics performer and the latest Maxwell iteration for NVIDIA, and with one qualification is the best GPU for Octane, V-ray and most GPU-accelerated workflows for that matter. To quote Anandtech’s Ryan Smith from his review:
Bringing this video card review to a close, through the last 14 pages of benchmarks we have seen the same result time and time again. While on paper the GeForce GTX 980 Ti should trail the GeForce GTX Titan X by several percent, what we get in the real world is much, much closer. With an average performance deficit of just 3%, GeForce GTX 980 Ti is for all intents and purposes GTX Titan X with a different name.
Typically NVIDIA engineers a wider gap between their cards, and while there is plenty of room for speculation here as to why they’d let GTX 980 Ti get so close to GTX Titan X – and make no mistake, it is intentional – at the end of the day none of that changes the final result. With a launch price of $649, the GTX 980 Ti may as well be an unofficial price cut to GTX Titan X, delivering flagship GeForce performance for 35% less.
As it stands GTX Titan X does have one remaining advantage that precludes it from being rendered redundant: its 12GB of VRAM, versus GTX 980 Ti’s 6GB. However without any current games requiring more than 6GB of VRAM – and any realistic workload running out of GPU throughput before running out of VRAM – the GTX Titan X’s place in this world now hinges on an uncertain degree of future-proofness. For this reason GTX Titan X isn’t going anywhere, it will still be around for buyers who need the very best, or even compute users after a cheap 12GB card, but for everyone else the GTX 980 Ti is now going to be the card all other high-end video cards are measured against.
Unless you are working in resolutions greater than 4K regularly, are doing huge, complex compositing or having beastly rendering needs such as large fluid and particle sim and simply must have the 12GB RAM buffer of the GTX Titan X (or you have 10-bit color needs which will point you to Quadro or FirePro), there is no better pro media graphics card value than the GTX 980 Ti out right now.
We will be benchmarking the GTX 980 Ti with Octane in configurations of 1 x GTX 980 Ti, 2 x 980 Ti and 3 x 980 Ti in a couple weeks following our PCIe SSD article later this week.
The GTX 980Ti is now available with our ever-popular i-X2, flagship i-XL, i-X, i7-X and up-to-8-GPU GPUx.