Rendering vs gaming vid cards

[fuzznarf]

I was wondering if there were any benchmarks that give me a relative comparison of the rendering capabilities (i.e. Tom's Blender Benchmark) apples to apples of an actual rendering cards vs a gaming card (ex. quadro or firepro VS 580 or 6970)

The reason I ask is that I like gaming, but I also do a lot of rendering and computational programming work. I would like to compare the performance of these cards. I pokes around here and on 3dguru but couldn't find and comparisons against each other.. The benchmarks always seem to be firepro vs quadro and 580 vs 6970 type stuff.

 

[ricardois]

I've found this post about nvidia vs quadro benchmarks, there you can see games benchmarks and also 3D Rendering benchmarks;

basically, quadro are great for rendering, and can be used to play game when needed but normally they will be worst for gaming than gaming graphics card just like with a gaming graphics card a 3D Rendering of 5min will take 30 secs on a quadro (rendering) graphics card... but this is very relative.

If you work with rendering and/or use a lot of it, you must take a rendering graphics card otherwise if you give preference for gaming most of time you can go for a high end gaming graphics that will let you render videos but will have a much worst performance than a rendering card.

 

[fuzznarf]

NVM! I found it right after I posted this.

Processor - 2600k
Motherboard - Asus Maximus IV Extreme (LGA 1155) Intel P67 Express, BIOS 0901
Memory - Crucial 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR3-1333, MT16JTF1G64AZ-1G4D1 @ DDR3-1600 and -1333 at 1.65 V
Graphics - Nvidia GeForce GTX 580 1.5 GB

Processors - Intel Core i7-980X (Gulftown) 3.33 GHz, LGA 1366, 6.4 GT/s QPI, 12 MB Shared L3, Hyper-Threading enabled, Power-savings enabled
Motherboard - Gigabyte X58A-UD5 (LGA 1366) Intel X58/ICH10R, BIOS FB
Memory - Kingston 6 GB (3 x 2 GB) DDR3-2000, KHX2000C8D3T1K3/6GX @ 8-8-8-24 and 1.65 V
Graphics
AMD FirePro V9800
Nvidia Quadro 5000

TOM's BLENDER TEST
GeForce 580 - 0:50
FirePro 9800 - 0:49.9
Quardo 5000 - 0:50.3

And yes I understand that the processors make a little bit of difference, but this is close enough for what I needed. Cost wasn't a real issue, but I didn't want to spend an extra $1k for only a 10% increase in performance on a rendering card. Though, I would have been willing to pay for a significant increase. I guess its not worth it to me for saving what make ultimately only be a few seconds per session.

 

[Trist_58]

Howdy. One more thing to keep in mind is that if you intend to create 3D content for production and have a high end display like an IPS, then a Quadro performs better in this respect. It's not that GTX cards are not capable of producing 10+ bit (per channel) color but it's just a limitation of the drivers. This is the main difference between the gaming and pro nvidia cards afaik.

If having a wide colour gamut is not important to your 3D work then a GTX would be fine.

 

[fuzznarf]

Thanks trist. More colors would be nice. but its not worth it to me for an extra 1k for a quadro 5000, or $3k for a quadro 6000. I was trying to find out mostly if rendering performance was 2 or 3 fold better than a gaming card. If so, it would have been worth it, but it doesn't appear to be the case. Most huge rendering computations I do overnight while i sleep, and I'm currently using a gts250 card. So upgrading to a 580, or maybe 680 in a few months will be the way to go.

Most of my work is freelance blender work, and also some 3d rendering for OpenGL game modelling.

 

[Trist_58]

No worries. Good luck with your upgrade!

BTW: I use a GTX 580 3GB in Max 2012 and it performs quite well in the viewport. I don't use GPU rendering but have tested IRay and the speed is very impressive compared to rendering with the CPU alone.

Cheers.