2080 Ti / 1080 Ti

CGXel

Users out there running either a single or dual 1080 Ti, is it more than enough power / speed for 3D rendering? 

Whenever developers pickup the RTX RT capability, would it out perform the 1080 Ti significantly?

What do you guys think the RTX would bring to the table for 3D users?

I can afford either a single 2080 Ti, dual 1080 Ti, or a 1080 Ti and save money.

CGXel

Another question, between a single 1080 Ti and dual 1070 Ti, which one would be better?

I noticed the 1080 Ti has 11 GB vRAM, while the 1070 Ti has 8 GB vRAM, I don't know how much of a difference is that since the "best" pc I had was running a 2GB vRAM card.

PolyHertz

Because the RTX technology is so new I don't think anyone has official support for it yet. Choasgroup / VRAY is working on support but I have no idea where that stands atm, while the Octane devs have said not to expect anything from them until next year. And I heard Blender doesn't support it yet either (though that may have changed atp).

Jump to 1:20 on this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6l2vQ8eRbiY

throttlekitty

For the first question, I'm running a 1080Ti with my old 980Ti (no, they don't need to match or be SLI'd), and it does just dandy, but more speed can never hurt. I can't post examples, but the style is like a stylized photoreal mix, lots of shiny and SSS, but not so heavy on refraction, so things generally render quickly for their large size. The questions to ask yourself are: which renderer, how often do you render, what are your needs (animation? scene size/textures vs VRAM?), and can you justify the price? (AKA I kinda need this but i also like gaming)

Here's chaosgroup's initial writeup on their experience with RTX. Quite promising, but it still might be some time before we see stable usage in public builds. It's important to note that they were included with Nvidia's conversation and perhaps some of the development of RTX, hard to say who elese was involved. I haven't sat down to look at renderer benchmarks from the 2080ti yet, so I don't know how much I could recommend that over dual (or even single) 1080Tis yet, given the current price. It's faster and on a new architecture, but I don't believe it's a huge leap over the 1080Ti and IMO this release seems rushed, and I really don't like this new "Gigarayzzzzz" buzzword they started throwing around. Given that RTX is primarily focused on realtime, we could expect IPRs to move a little quicker at the very least, and as extra power at the simplest.

As for 1080 vs dual 1070, firstly, the VRAM is not shared, that's only possible now with NVLink. So whatever you're doing needs to fit in each cards VRAM or else the renderer fails, unless it can do out-of-core. For price vs raw power in rendering, I'd suggest the dual 1070Tis; the clock speeds are lower, but you're getting much more CUDA than a single 1080Ti. The only 3D app that will really use your card in regular non-rendering work is Substance Painter.

CGXel

throttlekitty said:

 As for 1080 vs dual 1070, firstly, the VRAM is not shared, that's only possible now with NVLink.

Thank you for all that info, the V-Ray post cleared many questions I had, also, the NVLink sounds really good!

CGXel

PolyHertz said:

Choasgroup / VRAY is working on support but I have no idea where that stands atm

Hopefully we get a beta-ish version soon, would love to see how it performs