Blender is an extremely popular free and above all open source 3D suite. It supports almost the entire range of 3D pipeline modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, video editing and 2D animation. In other words, almost everything that the topic offers. Since the release of the 2.81 update, Blender now supports RTX-accelerated rendering with the NVIDIA OptiX rendering API in the Cycles renderer.
This accelerates render times on NVIDIA’s RTX GPUs and speeds up rendering output tremendously compared to CUDA or OpenCL. Measuring the final render times is a good way to evaluate the capabilities of GPUs when it comes to working efficiently and with as little interference as possible.
What is noticeable in these benchmarks is the OpenCL implementation of the Radeon VII, which in some situations almost falls into a black hole compared to the navigation charts. One has the feeling that it simply stopped optimizing somewhere. Not a good sign for the upcoming Radeon Pro VII.
OctaneBench is based on Octane from OTOY, an independent GPU renderer. This OctaneBench version provides experimental support for NVIDIA’s RTX hardware acceleration. The benchmark is still in development, but has been released by OTOY to give users a preview of the performance improvements possible with RTX acceleration. The benchmark renders the scene once with and once without RTX acceleration and provides a benchmark score for each method along with the improvement achieved with RTX acceleration.
Because of the benchmark design, I deliberately left out some cards, because the test either doesn’t run at all (OpenCL), or hardly makes any sense (Quadro Pascal).
- 1 - Overview & Benchmark Selection
- 2 - Creo 3.0
- 3 - Solidworks 2019
- 4 - Solidworks 2019 Enhanced
- 5 - 3ds Max 2015
- 6 - Inventor Pro 2020
- 7 - Various CAD and Science Applications
- 8 - Windows GDI und GDI+ Driver Performance
- 9 - Rendering & Compute
- 10 - Adobe Premiere Pro 2020 & DaVinci Resolve 16
- 11 - Adobe Lightroom Classic (2020)
- 12 - Autodesk Maya 2019 and Arnold
- 13 - Blender RTX (OptiX) & OctaneBench
- 14 - Thermal Imaging / Infrared
- 15 - Power Consumption
- 16 - PSU Recommendation