Howdy all, trying to build a new Rhino rig and traditionally have purchased nvidia cards for my workstations, however I’m wondering what the official stance is from McNeel WRT the latest cards from AMD.
Basically if I had to distill a question down would I want to buy an AMD 6800/6800XT w/16GB of vram or try the lottery for the 3080 10GB?
Thanks much for the feedback. And if anyone has landed a 3090 for their project machines I’d be interested in feedback as well. Sorry if repeat subject, search yields nothing on the 6800-series cards from AMD.
Edit to add: I’m after both real-time rendered viewport performance at 4K on models up to and including a full home that’s completely textured for photo realism, and also do occasionally render scenes or individual pieces of furniture for my clients. Thanks again.
At this very moment for Raytraced and Rhino Render in Rhino 7 the OpenCL performance is still a slower than the CUDA implementation. Improving OpenCL performance is on my list. That said I don’t know anything about the GPU you mentioned, so maybe it will be already quite good performance with these.
Currently with the AMD and NVidia GPUs in my machine the CUDA architecture is clearly faster. It should not hold you back from trying the OpenCL road. I just don’t know how well the 6800 (XT) works with Raytraced / Rhino Render.
For all the other viewport modes I’d imagine the card will be great. So if those are your main focus areas by all means go the AMD path.
Hi Nathan, thanks very much for the reply. The 6800 series are the new midrange offerings for gaming GPUs made by AMD. The XT has a bit more to the die but essentially a rough equivalent in processing power to that of a 3080. However, big caveat here, they get destroyed in ray tracing by Nvidia’s cards. This has me wondering, and you kinda mentioned it it OpenCL vs topic that yeah, there’s definitely a lot of raw compute power but I guess nobody has yet done a meaningful comparison as the GPU shortage is showing no signs of letting up. One leg up I thought would be a potential advantage for the slower AMD cards is their higher VRAM allotments. The Nvidia cards have fast memory buses despite the smaller 10GB VRAM so a bit of a question mark there. Then there of course is the 24GB 3090 which I’m leaning towards since the new Quadros (a6000 is basically a pro 3090) are so cost prohibitive.
At any rate thanks for the thoughts on implementing render paths for both technologies. And keep up the great work on Rhino.