A Deep Dive Into The AMD/Intel CPU + NVIDIA GPU Performance With Blender 2.90

For the last of the testing is a NVIDIA Turing and Pascal comparison with the recent NVIDIA GPUs I have access to. Unfortunately only GeForce GPUs and no Quadro hardware in our lab. Tested hardware was the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070, GTX 1080, GTX 1650 SUPER, GTX 1660, RTX 2060, RTX 2060 SUPER, RTX 2070, RTX 2070 SUPER, RTX 2080, RTX 2080 SUPER, and RTX 2080 Ti. A follow-up comparison with even older NVIDIA GPUs will be complete in the next few days on Phoronix.

For RTX GPUs, the NVIDIA OptiX code path for Blender 2.90 certainly pays off and delivers much better performance than the CUDA back-end. But for older non-RTX GPUs where OptiX is now enabled for Blender 2.90, the performance tended to be comparable to the CUDA path in cases like the GTX 1070 while the GTX 1650 SUPER for instance saw a nice boost.

For RTX GPUs with OptiX, the Blender performance is much better as we had seen from the 2.8x releases.

That's a look at the NVIDIA OptiX/CUDA performance with Blender 2.90. If you have a NVIDIA GPU and want to compare your own performance against the system and GPUs tested in this article, with the Phoronix Test Suite simply run phoronix-test-suite benchmark 2009039-FI-NVIDIAGPU54.

That wraps up my initial benchmarks of Blender 2.90 and will have more tests in future articles on Phoronix for this leading open-source 3D modeling software solution.