RTX 3080 Ti vs. 4070 Ti

gioloi

After years spent with my trusty Nvidia GTX 1080, I decided to give a boost to my rendering engine.

I'm really struggling to decide what's better between the 3080 Ti and the 4070 Ti.

Lots of benchmarks show that performances are more or less the same. 3080 has much more Cuda cores (10240 vs. 7680) and higher memory bandwidth (912 vs. 504 GB/s), but 4070's architecture is newer and better optimized, hence they say that it's capable to deliver comparable performances. More, 4070 drains less energy (285 W vs. 350 W).

My doubt is: all benchmarks take into consideration the gaming experience, because it's what matters for 99% of users, but for us Studio users, I guess that Cuda cores are pivotal and 10240 vs. 7680 means 33% more.

That said, in your opinion, what's the best one for Iray rendering? I'd say 3080, but I'm not that expert to take all variables into consideration and 4070 is newer and more optimized.

Leana

gioloi said:

 for us Studio users, I guess that Cuda cores are pivotal and 10240 vs. 7680 means 33% more.

Except that comparing the number of cores from 2 different card generations doesn't mean much, as newer generation cores are usually more efficient.

Not sure if these cards were tested in the benchmark thread but it might be worth checking: https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/341041/daz-studio-iray-rendering-hardware-benchmarking

gioloi

Leana said:

Except that comparing the number of cores from 2 different card generations doesn't mean much, as newer generation cores are usually more efficient.

Yes, of course, but 33% of difference is huge. If I'm not wrong, it never happened with older Nvidia generations.

I checked the link and it seems that neither 3080 Ti nor 4070 Ti have been tested. Thanks anyway for the hint.

PerttiA

gioloi said:

Leana said:

Except that comparing the number of cores from 2 different card generations doesn't mean much, as newer generation cores are usually more efficient.

Yes, of course, but 33% of difference is huge. If I'm not wrong, it never happened with older Nvidia generations.

I checked the link and it seems that neither 3080 Ti nor 4070 Ti have been tested. Thanks anyway for the hint.

The lists at the beginning of the thread have not been updated, one needs to read the latest pages to find results for the newer cards. 

gioloi

The 4070 Ti is probably too recent to have been already tested here.

Anyway, I found a comparative DAZ Studio rendering test on YouTube against a 1080 Ti, where the 4070 Ti resulted more than 4x faster than 1080 Ti, so I could expect that it's from 4x to 5x faster than my 1080.

To have a rough idea of how 4070 Ti scores against a 3080 Ti, I should now find a comparison between the latter and a 1080 Ti.

I already have the gut feeling that both cards will score more or less the same.

Kitsumo

Blender performance scales roughly the same as Iray opendata.blender.org

Also, the 40 series card will be around for another 2 years or so after the 30 series is deprecated (dropped from CUDA support).

gioloi

I eventually went for the 4070 Ti.

If it can be of some interest, I made a rendering comparison.

The scene was built with two G8, one G2 and three G1 characters. The set was Harpsburg, plain sunlight. Studio Version 4.15.

These are the rendering times up to 100% completion.

* 1080: 11 minutes 40.39 seconds
* 4070 Ti: 1 minute 58.38 seconds

So, 4070 Ti rendered this particular picture almost 6x faster than 1080. Well, the improvement is dramatic. I sincerely doubt that the 3080 Ti would perform better. Despite there are less cuda cores in the 4070 Ti, they must be materially faster.