3090 get (Patreon)

thicc rainbow boi 👀

Managed to get a 3090 last Friday (off of Newegg at 3 in the morning 🤪)  and now it's here 👀👀

I need to get this out of the way first though:

Yes, that IS another video card below it. That's my old 2060 Super. Yes, they are different cards. Yes, they are not connected via SLI or NVLink. Yes, SLI is dead and almost nothing supports NVLink. Yes. I know! But the Cycles engine in Blender (specifically Cycles, not Eevee)  supports rendering with two (or more) video cards at the same time, even if they're different cards/not linked together/ect. So that's why I have two cards in there. Good? Good.

The temperature of both GPUs seems fine. While doing these tests the 3090 reached a peak temp of 79c (2060 Super reached 69 heh heh) It certainly blows a lot of hot air out of the back of the case though... CPU temp doesn't seem to be different at all. 

As is tradition, here are some nerd benchmarks because I love me some nerd benchmarks 🤓 Benchmarks done in Cycles also done in Blender 3.0 benchmarks with Cycles X! 

Blender Classoom (Blender 2.93, Cycles, OptiX, CPU + GPU, 32 tiles)

2060 Super:  55 seconds

3090: 21 seconds

2060 + 3090: 18 seconds

3090 is much faster! Both cards is... a little faster.

Blender Classoom (Blender 3.0, Cycles X, OptiX, CPU + GPU, Cycles X doesn't use tiles :O)

2060 Super:  21 seconds

3090: 13 seconds

2060 + 3090: 12 seconds

Cycles X is much faster! It might not seem like much of a difference here, but in both Cycles and Cycles X renders the single 3090 is 61% faster than the 2060! :o

Blender BMW, GPU only (Blender 2.93, Cycles, OptiX)

2060 Super:  34 seconds

3090: 9 seconds

2060 + 3090: 18 seconds

Much faster. I think the dual cards is slower in this example because of the gigantic tile size (512x512), so the 3090 finishes rendering its tile before the 2060, then has to wait for the 2060 to be done? 🤔

Blender BMW, GPU only (Blender 3.0, Cycles X, OptiX)

2060 Super:  14 seconds

3090: 8 seconds

2060 + 3090: 7 seconds

...Dual cards is a tiny bit faster in this one though. Probably because Cycles X doesn't use tiles? 

Blender Spaceship (Eevee, 2k samples)

2060 Super: 37 seconds

3090: 17 seconds

Yep. Faster. Can't use both cards at the same time in Eevee though!

Again, those are artificial benchmarks, We need real world examples 👀

Mei anim render (WHICH IM STLL WORKING ON I SWEAR) (Eevee) 

2060 Super: 19 seconds

3090: 8 seconds

👀 fast 👀

Mei anim video render (Davinci Resolve, NVENC encoding, with some effects and motion blur and stuff)

2060 Super: 69 seconds (nice) 

3090 34 seconds 

Nice, but also nice

Brig Expansion (Blender 2.93, Cycles, OptiX, CPU + GPU, 32 tiles, 800 samples) (last anim I made in Cycles) 

2060 Super:  8:09 (489 seconds) (honestly that's estimated after like 3 mins of rendering, didn't feel like waiting LOL)

3090: 3:58 (238 seconds)

2060 + 3090: 3:19 (199 seconds)

Pretty much what I expected 👌

Brig Expansion (Blender 3.0, Cycles X, OptiX, CPU + GPU, 800 samples) 

2060 Super:  3:44 (224 seconds)

3090: 2:11 (131 seconds)

2060 + 3090: 2:22 (142 seconds)

... This is where it starts getting confusing. Both cards is slower? I tried rendering it without the CPU, GPU Only: 

3090: 2:00 (120 seconds)

2060 + 3090: 1:34 (94 seconds)

I don't get it 🤷‍♀️ CPU rendering with OptiX is fairly new, so maybe it's not that optimized/Cycles X still has work to do with CPU rendering?

Tracer/Widow Beach (Blender 2.93, Cycles, OptiX, CPU + GPU, 32 tiles, 500 samples)

2060 Super:  2:40 (160 seconds)

3090: 1:28 (88 seconds)

2060 + 3090: 1:17 (77 seconds)

Both cards is only a little faster again, which is fairly confusing...

Tracer/Widow Beach  (Blender 3.0, Cycles X, OptiX, CPU + GPU, 500 samples) 

2060 Super:  1:09 (89 seconds)

3090: 45 seconds

2060 + 3090: 43 seconds

Dual cards provides even less of a boost! Tried rendering without CPU, GPU Only again:

3090:    35 seconds

2060 + 3090: 32 seconds

...again rendering with CPU is slower. I went back and tried rendering the Tracer/Widow anim in 2.92 with the GPUs only (at a much higher tile size) and it rendered 10 seconds slower than with CPU 🤔

So Cycles X is really good! ...sometimes. Mot of the time. Sometimes it crashes a lot. When trying to render the Brig anim it kept crashing my drivers and I had to restart my PC to get it to stop crashing 🤷‍♀️ Then it stopped crashing. Hasn't crashed since. I dunno. Such is life with alpha software. It's implementation of CPU rendering also doesn't seem very good.

So what's the biggest takeaway from this? Well, that Brig anim would have taken me:

65 hours in 2.93 render with my 2060

30 hours in 3.0 with the 2060

12 hours in 3.0 with the 2060 and 3090 👀

And the Tracer/Widow anim:

22 hours in 2.93 with the 2060

12 hours in 3.0 with the 2060

4 hours in 3.0 with the 2060 and 3090 👀

The Mei (Eevee) anim took 6.5 hours to render with the 2060, and would/will only take 2.7 hours with the 3090 :o 

I'm not sure what I'm going to do though. I might try going back to Cycles? (I switched from Cycles back to Eevee in December of last year, got tired of Cycles' render times... Cycles X didn't exist back then :p) If not I could start rendering 4k animations in Eevee 🤔 Who knows? I certainly don't 🤪 EDIT: Hmmm, I've already found some bugs with Cycles X, that's not good...

TL;DR: video card go brrrrrrrrrrrr

I would like to thank you all (again) for supporting me, this wouldn't have been possible without all your support 🤗 (I also got a new monitor the other day, and the colors are kinda making me freak out...)