Hello,
We typically recommend going for the GPUs with the most VRAM. So, if I had to choose between the two, I’d go for the old Titan. Or, alternatively, I’d wait a little while longer and see how the 980Ti 6GB pans out. Even though the old Titan cannot use more than 4GB out of its 6GB for the geo cache, the remaining 2GB can still be used for rays, particles, a larger texture cache as well as prevent memory management headaches when other apps (which also use VRAM) are running. Apps like Chrome or the Softimage OpenGL viewport itself! Furthermore, both the old and new Titans can use the new TCC (Tesla Compute Cluster) driver mode which can increase rendering performance. That mode has a few pros and cons – you can find more details about this in our forums. Hope this helps -Panos From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Leoung O'Young Sent: Friday, May 29, 2015 10:53 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Heavy scenes with the GTX 970 Panos, So if I was going to buy a second hand card, it better go with a GTX 980 with 4gb instead of a old Titan with 6gb since the the 980 uses less power, since these cards have a 4gb geo cache limit? Leoung On 29/05/2015 12:47 PM, Panagiotis Zompolas wrote: Hey guys, Panos from Redshift here. Just wanted to clarify that the TitanX (as well as any future compute capability 5.2 cards with more than 4GB) does not have a 4GB geo cache limit. The 4GB limit only applies to earlier-generation videocards, including the old Titans/Quadros. Kind regards, -Panos From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Tim Crowson Sent: Friday, May 29, 2015 9:33 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Heavy scenes with the GTX 970 The Titan X is actually a really great value though, especially if you're a Redshift user. 12GB on a $1,000 card? Once they lift the hard-coded 4GB geo cache limit (which they really should do sooner than later), that 12GB is going to translate into not only faster renders, but a much better ability to handle dense scenes with millions of instances. I broke past 1 quadrillion triangles with a Titan Black (cramming in 32M+ instances), and I hope I get to run that test again with a Titan X someday. -Tim On 5/29/2015 10:28 AM, Leoung O'Young wrote: Hi Tim, You could be right. We had a gtx 570 with only 1.5gb and it was performing better than the 970 with 4gb. Soft is probably using the .5 of very slow memory. Things are really slow only when we have the camera window open. We are quite happy with the 970's in Redshift. Would love to get our hands on the Titan X with 12gb but they are rather expensive. We have a gtx 670 4gb and a gtx 690 4gb but it is really 2 card in one. We will do some testing with those cards and report back. Thanks, Leoung On 29/05/2015 10:17 AM, Tim Crowson wrote: Yeah this could possibly be happening, but indeed the scene would have to be pretty dense. Fire up GPU-Z and see how many vram XSI uses. I know that for Redshift, the devs had to add a patch just for the 970 to actually ignore the 500MB of slow memory that Nvidia put on the 970. Or something like that. I suppose if that section of memory is being accessed by XSI, and since it's much slower than the rest of the on-board memory, perhaps that could have an effect like this? I'm talking a bit out of my area though.... (backstory: When Nvidia shipped the 970, they got a lot of backlash.... the 970 technically does have 4GB of memory, but 500MB of that operates at a speed that makes it virtually unusable for things like rendering (and other stuff), and indeed early on caused dramatic performance problems and slow-downs. So in reality, we only have 3.5GB of usable memory to render with on that card. I do hope they don't pull that crap again.) -Tim On 5/28/2015 8:51 PM, Raffaele Fragapane wrote: If your "heavy" scene is truly heavy, past the 3.5GB mark, you might be bumping into a known design limitation of the 970 that basically craps itself if memory usage exceeds the 3.5 mark (even if you have 4 on board). On Fri, May 29, 2015 at 11:37 AM, Leoung O'Young <[email protected]> wrote: No, thanks for the suggestion. On 28/05/2015 7:46 PM, Sven Constable wrote: Manipulating heavy geo was a problem with ATI cards, nvidia usually performes well. Did you add the xsi.exe in the nvidia control panel? sven -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Leoung O'Young Sent: Friday, May 29, 2015 1:20 AM To: xsi Subject: Heavy scenes with the GTX 970 We have switched some of our workstation using the GTX 970's, they preforms quite well rendering in Redshift. A good bang for the buck. But we find the it is very sluggish manipulating heavy geometry scenes inside Softimage 2915. What is a better option? Thanks, Leoung -- Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it and let them flee like the dogs they are! -- Tim Crowson Lead CG Artist Magnetic Dreams, Inc. 2525 Lebanon Pike, Bldg C, Suite 101, Nashville, TN 37214 Ph 615.885.6801 | Fax 615.889.4768 | www.magneticdreams.com [email protected] Confidentiality Notice: This email, including attachments, is confidential and should not be used by anyone who is not the original intended recipient(s). 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