nVidia GTX680 with iRay

[victorbarbu1]

Hi!

I saved enough money to buy a new graphics card for my machine. I heard a lot of good things about the GTX 680 from nVidia: one of them is that this grpahics card is made for games. I know I need a Quadro for 3DS Max iRay, though I don't have enough money for it.

I want to know what is your opinion. How will this card work with iRay?

 

My machine configuration: 16GB RAM DDR3, 7200rpm HDD, Intel Core i5 3.2GHz

[Dimitris Tolios]

Hi!

I saved enough money to buy a new graphics card for my machine. I heard a lot of good things about the GTX 680 from nVidia: one of them is that this grpahics card is made for games. I know I need a Quadro for 3DS Max iRay, though I don't have enough money for it.

I want to know what is your opinion. How will this card work with iRay?

 

My machine configuration: 16GB RAM DDR3, 7200rpm HDD, Intel Core i5 3.2GHz

 

iRay doesn't need a Quadro to work. It needs a compatible CUDA enabled GPU. That's pretty much all Geforce cards you can find in the market.

 

There is no "magic" in the Quadro hardware that makes it better when it comes to GPU compute. The 680 will perform as good if not better than a Quadro K5000.

 

Take a look at the new GTX 770. It is a re-branded 680, with same cuda cores but a "smarter" BIOS that controls how high the card boosts

based on temperature (1st introduced with the Titan), and VRam that operates at 7GHz instead of 6GHz (effective DDR5, it is actually 1,750MHz, while the 6xx cards do 1,500MHz).

 

I would go for a 680 only if the price difference was attractive enough, although to be honnest 770 won't be much faster in iRay/VRay RT.

It is just newer, slightly faster and in case you need to sell it, it will be nearly 2 years "younger" tech wise in the perception of a buyer.

[victorbarbu1]

Thank you so much! I will know what to buy not to waste my money.

[victorbarbu1]

I have come up with this reply because I have read more about comparisons between GTXs and Quadros. Everyone is talking about cooling (a topic that I hdn't thought about previously). Because I am going to use the GPU for heavy work (hours of rndering, etc.) I need to be sure that it is not going to break down.

In terns of money, I think these are my limits, so I have to be sure that I do the right choice. I'll wait for more opinions.

Thanks in advance.

[Dimitris Tolios]

If a card "breaks down", it is because of you being unlucky.

Said in another thread, most times Quadro cards are a bit underclocked by comparison to Geforce cards using EXACTLY the same core, but other than that Quadro's don't run cooler and I cannot see anything else that could harm a GPU over time.

 

The hottest card I've owned and used over the last few years, is definitely my Quadro 4000...that thing is reaching 70oC when idling.

 

If there was a basis in claims that Quadro cards break down less often than GeForce cards, is simply because Quadro cards are not used daily @ 100% load but by a VERY small % of users, while high-end gaming cards are usually abused, working @ 100% load or nearly that for many hours a day, around other overclocked / hot hardware running @ 100% etc etc.

 

Most design work rarely stresses 100% both the GPU and CPU at the same time, and before GPU acceleration was used for Premiere and later other Adobe programs and progressive renderings through GPUs, I doubt that Quadros or other workstation GPUs would hit 100% load for more than a few seconds or fractions of a second a time - i.e. you pan around, orbit around a heavy model, GPU usage spikes, then as you zoom in or start manipulating, it drops to low usage %, while in gaming a card would be forced to render high paced frames one after the other after the other for long sessions @ 100%.

 

Most people involved in GPU rendering right now, use GTX cards, simply because the price difference is insane...

You can sacrifice 4-5 680/770s before you break even with the initial cost of a K5000 that would offer similar performance to just one of them. Or you can make a system that it will stress itself for 1/4 the time, as it will render 4 times as fast with 4x GTXs instead of 1x K5000...

 

We don't know how expensive the K6000 will be, but again, will probably be 3-4 times the price of a Titan at least (yes, it has 12GB buffer, but money is money).

 

So, it is hard to justify a Quadro for GPU rendering no-matter how you see it.

Edited August 19, 2013 by dtolios

[victorbarbu1]

If a card "breaks down", it is because of you being unlucky.

Said in another thread, most times Quadro cards are a bit underclocked by comparison to Geforce cards using EXACTLY the same core, but other than that Quadro's don't run cooler and I cannot see anything else that could harm a GPU over time.

 

The hottest card I've owned and used over the last few years, is definitely my Quadro 4000...that thing is reaching 70oC when idling.

 

If there was a basis in claims that Quadro cards break down less often than GeForce cards, is simply because Quadro cards are not used daily @ 100% load but by a VERY small % of users, while high-end gaming cards are usually abused, working @ 100% load or nearly that for many hours a day, around other overclocked / hot hardware running @ 100% etc etc.

 

Most design work rarely stresses 100% both the GPU and CPU at the same time, and before GPU acceleration was used for Premiere and later other Adobe programs and progressive renderings through GPUs, I doubt that Quadros or other workstation GPUs would hit 100% load for more than a few seconds or fractions of a second a time - i.e. you pan around, orbit around a heavy model, GPU usage spikes, then as you zoom in or start manipulating, it drops to low usage %, while in gaming a card would be forced to render high paced frames one after the other after the other for long sessions @ 100%.

 

Most people involved in GPU rendering right now, use GTX cards, simply because the price difference is insane...

You can sacrifice 4-5 680/770s before you break even with the initial cost of a K5000 that would offer similar performance to just one of them. Or you can make a system that it will stress itself for 1/4 the time, as it will render 4 times as fast with 4x GTXs instead of 1x K5000...

 

We don't know how expensive the K6000 will be, but again, will probably be 3-4 times the price of a Titan at least (yes, it has 12GB buffer, but money is money).

 

So, it is hard to justify a Quadro for GPU rendering no-matter how you see it.

 

I got it! Thanks a lot, again!