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GPUs are also used with professional applications, AI training and inferencing, and more. We still don't have a great AI benchmark, though we did test Stable Diffusion with output settings of 2048x1152 and it mostly seems to work — on Nvidia GPUs at any rate. We also have several 3D rendering applications that leverage ray tracing hardware (two of which only work on Nvidia GPUs again), plus the SPECviewperf 2020 v3 test suite. Let's start there.
SPECviewperf 2020 consists of eight different benchmarks, and we use the geometric mean from those to generate an aggregate "overall" score. Note that this is not an official score, but it gives equal weight to the individual tests and provides a nice high-level overview of performance. Few professionals use all of these programs, however, so it's generally more important to look at the results for the applications you plan to use.
Across the eight tests, Nvidia's RTX 4070 Ti basically ties the RTX 3090 Ti, and trails the 4080 by 18% and the 4090 by 34%. AMD has improved its SPECviewperf results a lot with recent driver updates, which means the aggregate score has all of the tested AMD GPUs leading even the RTX 4090. That's largely thanks to the excellent performance in snx-04, or Nvidia's terrible performance on the consumer RTX cards. AMD also rates higher in catia-06, creo-03, and medical-03, while Nvidia GPUs do better in 3dsmax-07, maya-06, and solidworks-07 — with energy-03 being more neutral.
Moving on to 3D rendering, Blender is a popular open-source rendering application, and we're using the latest Blender Benchmark, which uses Blender 3.40 and three tests. Blender 3.40 also includes the new Cycles X engine that leverages ray tracing hardware on AMD, Nvidia, and even Intel Arc GPUs. It does so via AMD's HIP interface (Heterogeneous-computing Interface for Portability), Nvidia's CUDA or OptiX APIs, and Intel's OneAPI — which means Nvidia GPUs have some performance advantages due to the OptiX API.
The 4070 Ti ends up just ahead of the 3090 Ti this time, winning in two of three individual scenes as well as in the aggregate score. It's interesting that Junkshop favors the 3090 Ti, probably because it has a larger memory footprint and thus hits some bottlenecks with only 12GB VRAM. AMD's GPUs meanwhile fall far behind with the 4070 Ti basically doubling the performance of the 7900 XTX. The 4070 Ti also trails the 4080 by 22% in Blender performance.
Our final two professional applications only have ray tracing hardware support for Nvidia's GPUs. We reached out to the companies to find out why that's the case, and it largely comes down to reliability and stability — Optane dropped OpenCL support for example because the API was no longer seeing active development.
While we don't have the AMD GPUs, the performance rankings in OctaneBench and V-Ray both end up being relatively similar to the Blender results. Octane puts the 4070 Ti roughly on equal footing with the 3090 Ti, as does V-Ray, while performance trails the 4080 by 23% and 25%.
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