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GPUs are also used with professional applications, AI training and inferencing, and more. We're hoping to add some AI benchmarks soon… but we ran out of time. For now, we've got several 3D rendering applications that leverage ray tracing hardware along with the SPECviewperf 2020 v3 test suite.
SPECviewperf 2020 consists of eight different benchmarks, and we use the geometric mean from those tests 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 4080 trails the costlier 4090 by 20% on average. Performance is nearly tied in creo-03. Energy-03 and medical-03 favor the 4090 a bit more, but the performance difference is relatively similar to what we saw in our 4K gaming results. In turn, the 4080 beats the 3090 Ti by 20%, leads the 3080 Ti by 33%, and comes out 48% faster than the RTX 3080. It's only tied with the Titan RTX, thanks to the significantly higher score that card gets in snx-04.
AMD tends to be a bit more generous with professional application optimizations on consumer hardware, and the latest drivers gave a sizeable boost to AMD's SPECviewperf scores. That results in AMD delivering better performance than the RTX 4080 in half of the tests, and the major Nvidia deficit in snx-04 gives AMD's GPUs the overall lead as well. However, if your professional application of choice is 3D Studio Max, Maya, or SolidWorks, the RTX 4080 takes the lead.
Blender is a popular open-source rendering application, and we're using the latest Blender Benchmark, which uses Blender 3.30 and three tests. Blender 3.30 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.
Being open-source has one major advantage, and it's the ability of the various companies to deliver their own rendering updates. This gives us the closest option for an apples-to-apples performance comparison of professional 3D rendering using the various GPUs. Blender and other 3D rendering applications tend to show the raw ray tracing hardware performance, though architectural elements can come into play.
In this case, Nvidia's latest Ada Lovelace GPUs thoroughly crush the competition. The RTX 4080 delivers about four times the performance of the RX 6950 XT, and even the old Titan RTX comes in ahead of AMD's "best" with about double the performance.
That said, we have to wonder how much of the gap comes down to better optimizations in the code for Nvidia's CUDA and OptiX APIs. Maybe AMD will release a driver at some point that massively improves its Blender performance. Barring that, even if the RX 7900 XTX is twice as fast as the 6950 XT, it will still fall behind Nvidia's RTX 40-series cards.
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 — for example, Optane dropped OpenCL support because the API was no longer seeing active development.
Without AMD GPUs in the mix, all we can really see is how the RTX 4080 fares against the 4090 and 30-series cards. Even though it has less memory and memory bandwidth, the 4080 still leads the 3090 Ti by nearly 30% on average in Octane and closer to 35% in V-Ray. It's also 60–70 percent faster than the RTX 3080. Basically, Nvidia's RTX GPUs are the gold standard in professional 3D rendering applications for a reason: It was first with hardware, and it provided and continues to provide active developer support.
[I've run out of time (again), but I'm going to try to add some machine learning benchmarks in the near future. Stay tuned…]
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