AMD HIP vs. NVIDIA CUDA vs. NVIDIA OptiX On Blender 3.2

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMD HIP vs. NVIDIA CUDA vs. NVIDIA OptiX On Blender 3.2

Last week with the release of Blender 3.2 bringing AMD HIP support for Linux to provide for Radeon GPU acceleration, I posted some initial benchmarks of AMD Radeon RX 6000 series with HIP against NVIDIA RTX with OptiX. There was interest by some Phoronix readers in also seeing NVIDIA CUDA results even though OptiX is in good shape with RTX GPUs, so with that here are results of NVIDIA CUDA vs. NVIDIA OptiX vs. AMD HIP with Blender 3.2 on Ubuntu Linux.

https://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=31208

[Steffo]

Thx for this interesting benchmark, Michael. Sad to see, that AMD is still years behind NVIDIA!

[piotrj3]

Thanks a lot Michael for adressing complains about lacking CUDA in last tests!

Results are in line with what i expected.

[aufkrawall]

Looks like the CUDA option has become mostly superfluous vs. OptiX since Blender 3.0 release, as it finally has become faster also in less complex render scenes. I guess that's what can happen with a software, API and driver development strategy that isn't erratic and unreliable.

[Mathias]

HIP works for my 5700 RDNA1 card with blender. But I think it has problems with textures that have non-power-of-2 dimensions, which at least the BMW benchmark uses.

On a performance per Dollar benchmark, the AMD cards are not even that much worse then NVidia/Cuda. But is there even a reason to not use Optix? Does Optix support everything Cycles/Cuda does? I know AMD Prorender doesn't support everything.

[peterdk]

Great, thanks for the inclusion of CUDA.

[piotrj3]

HIP works for my 5700 RDNA1 card with blender. But I think it has problems with textures that have non-power-of-2 dimensions, which at least the BMW benchmark uses.

On a performance per Dollar benchmark, the AMD cards are not even that much worse then NVidia/Cuda. But is there even a reason to not use Optix? Does Optix support everything Cycles/Cuda does? I know AMD Prorender doesn't support everything.

On initial 2.8 release optix missed few features but they were readded in 2.9x. Since 3.0 optix from what i know supports everything, and it uses same renderer just with diffrent backend, so results should be the same.

in case of HIP, according to blender docs misses "The Clip extension mode in the Image Texture Node is not supported."

in case of Metal, MNEE caustics are not supported in Metal.

So in fact feature parity is biggest in CUDA/Optix.

[brucethemoose]

Obviously not all of this is architecture, but *part* of it is, right? AMD has a more gaming centric, bandwidth-light design atm.


IIRC this used to be flip flopped, where AMD was the one with more theoretical compute power and higher bandwidth in otherwise similarly performing cards. I remember the *old* 6000 series and the GCN1 7000 series being particularly good at brute force crypto mining compared to Fermi.

[elatllat]

...On a performance per Dollar benchmark, the AMD cards are not even that much worse then NVidia/Cuda...

I thought 4.4x was much worse;

https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/hardware/graphics-cards/1328189-blender-3-2-performance-with-amd-radeon-hip-vs-nvidia-geforce-on-linux

[zexelon]

Really interesting results! Alas yes AMD is still far behind Nvidia on the GPGPU front, but at least its a huge improvement to see them trying finally!