New Graphics Card for VFX

Jonathan85

Hello, i will be buying new pc probably, but im split in the graphics card to choose, my picks are narrowed to

Nvidia 960 or ATI (AMD) R9 280 (or even 280X). It will be probably with core i7 4790K procesor (in that pc).
I will use that pc for graphics, 3ds max, maybe i will try also some GPU rendering (furryball?) (but i dont have experience so far with it).

But mainly i will use this for photogrammetry, mainly Agisoft photoscan.

I have heard that photoscan isnt really good with nvidia cards due to nvidia not being good with openCL support in their drivers, so ATI card should have a big advantage in photoscan, is it true?

What graphics card would you recomend me? GTX 960 or ATI R9 280?

Thanks

Cathodeus

Nvidia because of Cuda.

marks

CUDA is not OpenCL bro. One of the graphics programmers I used to work with swore by ATI cards purely because of OpenCL so I can kind of believe it might be better for heavy OpenCL work.

Jonathan85

marks:

Swore on ATI cards like in a good sense (english is not my native language im not sure if i got that sentence right)?

ZacD

AMD cards are great for some OpenCL uses, certain heavy OpenCL applications see much better performance with AMD.

*Corrected comment

Jonathan85

Thanks ZAC, and this performance difference is due to drivers only, so there is some chance, even current GTX cards might catch up the performance difference with some new drivers?

ZacD

Really the best way to compare them would be to run benchmarks in Agisoft photoscan, there is some pretty major difference in their architecture that makes AMD better for some tasks, such as mining crypto currency. But it really depends on how Agisoft photoscan works and how optimized it is for AMD and Nvidia GPUs.

agmeadows

I would start with what programs you are going to use and figure out which brand will work best.

As far as raw power goes AMD and NVidia are fairly close (in the mid to high end price range anyway). I have used AMD for the last 5 or 6 years and they work well for most things.

However, I have been using VRay for rendering and the RT render engine has a lot of issues with AMD cards even though it is OpenCL. Also, Mental Ray is standard in 3dsmax which is an Nvidia developed renderer and the GPU engine only works on NVidia cards.

In short, look at the apps you plan to use and determine how to best leverage the GPU. Hardware is really irrelevant other than price to performance ratio. It is how your software uses the hardware that is important. Remember, AMD can do OpenCL, but NVidia can do OpenCL and CUDA. If your apps require CUDA you really have no choice.

I did a quick look at Agisoft's site and it looks like they recommend NVidia. If that is your primary app, it wouldn't hurt to go with that the developer recommends.