New pc gpu lost between 3090 and 4090

amylee_07

Hi there. I am building a new pc solely for daz3d vram intensive scenes iray rendering and I have been checking all the cool benchmark threads here. I found 2 cards on my local shop: 4090 costing me 1780$, while 3090 is 900$.

So I was looking at the benchamrks and it seems 3090 is not that far behind the 4090 but I was wondering if there are other technical differences/difficulties between the two cards. I am kinda confused to be honest all the other pc parts are almost set but I am lost between the two cards. If there is any advantage other than performance increase with 4090 compared to 3090 I would like to know your opinions/experiences.

Thank you.

Richard Haseltine

You may want to wait on the next iray update as that, according to nVidia, has better support for the 40x0 cards. We know that the updated Iray is out, we don't know when  (or if, there may be issues thata ffect DS enough to delay for this verion) it will be available in DS, or what difference it will make.

amylee_07

Oh I see. So with this new upcoming iray update 4000 cards still has potential to perform even better compared to 3000 series. That is interesting. Thanks for the news!

Pickle Renderer

Richard Haseltine said:

You may want to wait on the next iray update as that, according to nVidia, has better support for the 40x0 cards. We know that the updated Iray is out, we don't know when  (or if, there may be issues thata ffect DS enough to delay for this verion) it will be available in DS, or what difference it will make.

Richard, is that from the internal dev grapevine or is there an nVidia release about it?  I'd be interested to read it.

oddbob

Pickle Renderer said:

Richard Haseltine said:

You may want to wait on the next iray update as that, according to nVidia, has better support for the 40x0 cards. We know that the updated Iray is out, we don't know when  (or if, there may be issues thata ffect DS enough to delay for this verion) it will be available in DS, or what difference it will make.

Richard, is that from the internal dev grapevine or is there an nVidia release about it?  I'd be interested to read it.

Iray dev blog Iray 2023.0.0 final

All it says is - optimized general performance on the Ada Lovelace GPU architecture. No numbers.

Richard Haseltine

Pickle Renderer said:

Richard Haseltine said:

You may want to wait on the next iray update as that, according to nVidia, has better support for the 40x0 cards. We know that the updated Iray is out, we don't know when  (or if, there may be issues thata ffect DS enough to delay for this verion) it will be available in DS, or what difference it will make.

Richard, is that from the internal dev grapevine or is there an nVidia release about it?  I'd be interested to read it.

It's from nVidia, I can't recall if it was in a blog or release notes for the new Iray build and i don't have a link to hand (since I am  still on a 2080Ti I don't even care, sniff).

oddbob

amylee_07 said:

If there is any advantage other than performance increase with 4090 compared to 3090 I would like to know your opinions/experiences.

A 4090 is more power efficient, has a bigger cooler and  tends to run at lower temps. I found my 3090 to be annoyingly loud but then I'm a quiet freak, people seem happy with their 4090s as far as noise goes. My 4090 was watercooled from new so I can't comment.

I'm guessing the 3090 is used, does it have any sort of warranty? A 4090 gets 2 to 5 years depending on manufacturer and region.

The 3090 has NVlink support but that only matters if you intend to buy two.

Can't think of anything else except that the 4090 is generally bigger and heavier and would make a better club if the zombie thing ever happens.

amylee_07

oddbob said:

amylee_07 said:

If there is any advantage other than performance increase with 4090 compared to 3090 I would like to know your opinions/experiences.

A 4090 is more power efficient, has a bigger cooler and  tends to run at lower temps. I found my 3090 to be annoyingly loud but then I'm a quiet freak, people seem happy with their 4090s as far as noise goes. My 4090 was watercooled from new so I can't comment.

I'm guessing the 3090 is used, does it have any sort of warranty? A 4090 gets 2 to 5 years depending on manufacturer and region.

The 3090 has NVlink support but that only matters if you intend to buy two.

Can't think of anything else except that the 4090 is generally bigger and heavier and would make a better club if the zombie thing ever happens.

hey thanks for the reply. Both cards are new and I plan to buy only 1.

Noise is not an issue for me tbh I leave it to render during night in my pc room. But if 4090 is a cooler and less power hungry card than 3090 or has a big gap in performance to justify almost double price of 3090 I am willing to go with that.

Could you share some of your experiences with these cards?

 

TimberWolf

If you're running rendering overnight then the 4090 is the card for you. As a background I run a little company that makes mobile escape room/adventure/mystery games for iOS and Android and we use Studio to create the pre-rendered scenes as well as the animations of opening cupboards, drawers, windows, that kind of thing. We run our render queue overnight as well.

We bought a 3090 somewhere close to launch and sold it after a couple of months for one reason - it ran too hot. The VRAM on those cards gets to what I would consider to be fairly extreme temperatures without substantial modification (invalidating the warranty). It's a gaming card and the cooling doesn't seem to have been designed to run for 12+ hours at (almost) full tilt. Rendering isn't quite as hard on the card as gaming is but the 3090 is not a professional or semi-professional rendering solution. 

That said, neither is the 4090 but it's a heck of a lot better in terms of speed, power useage and temperatures. We bought one to evaluate it and in real world terms it was about 50% faster than then 3090 and it's now installed in our development PC. We're still running our older Ampere-based A6000s due to VRAM size on the rendering box. 

If I had to throw away our setup and buy one consumer grade GPU right now, I'd buy the 4090. No contest.

If you don't need it *right now*, I'd sit on my hands. We're skipping the pro version of the 4090 and will probably move to the 5090 based architecture when it's released which is rumoured to be Q1 2025.

If you do need it right now, the 4090 is a big step up in terms of speed and efficiency from the 3090.

amylee_07

TimberWolf said:

If you're running rendering overnight then the 4090 is the card for you. As a background I run a little company that makes mobile escape room/adventure/mystery games for iOS and Android and we use Studio to create the pre-rendered scenes as well as the animations of opening cupboards, drawers, windows, that kind of thing. We run our render queue overnight as well.

We bought a 3090 somewhere close to launch and sold it after a couple of months for one reason - it ran too hot. The VRAM on those cards gets to what I would consider to be fairly extreme temperatures without substantial modification (invalidating the warranty). It's a gaming card and the cooling doesn't seem to have been designed to run for 12+ hours at (almost) full tilt. Rendering isn't quite as hard on the card as gaming is but the 3090 is not a professional or semi-professional rendering solution. 

That said, neither is the 4090 but it's a heck of a lot better in terms of speed, power useage and temperatures. We bought one to evaluate it and in real world terms it was about 50% faster than then 3090 and it's now installed in our development PC. We're still running our older Ampere-based A6000s due to VRAM size on the rendering box. 

If I had to throw away our setup and buy one consumer grade GPU right now, I'd buy the 4090. No contest.

If you don't need it *right now*, I'd sit on my hands. We're skipping the pro version of the 4090 and will probably move to the 5090 based architecture when it's released which is rumoured to be Q1 2025.

If you do need it right now, the 4090 is a big step up in terms of speed and efficiency from the 3090.

Thank you. That was exactly the information I was looking for. Made my choice easier. 

oddbob

amylee_07 said:

hey thanks for the reply. Both cards are new and I plan to buy only 1.

Noise is not an issue for me tbh I leave it to render during night in my pc room. But if 4090 is a cooler and less power hungry card than 3090 or has a big gap in performance to justify almost double price of 3090 I am willing to go with that.

Could you share some of your experiences with these cards?

The 3090 has vram on the front and back of the card which is harder to cool. Temps in the 90s aren't uncommon. Under a heavy gaming load mine used to hit 102c at which point the fans ramp aggressively.

I worried about the longevity of the card and water cooled it, which bought the temps down into the 70s which is about where I'd expect a stock air cooled 4090 to be under heavy load.

For setting up a scene, sims and Iray viewport performance I think you'd have to have both cards side by side to tell the difference, they're both quick. I render 4K stills and use the DS beta which has better 40 series support, I also run higher vram speeds than stock as the card is easier to cool and I have a lot of cooling. I get 60 - 70% better performance than I did with the 3090 in the last release version of Studio that I used for about 50w less power draw.

If I was choosing between the two cards now at the prices you listed I'd buy the 4090.

amylee_07

oddbob said:

amylee_07 said:

hey thanks for the reply. Both cards are new and I plan to buy only 1.

Noise is not an issue for me tbh I leave it to render during night in my pc room. But if 4090 is a cooler and less power hungry card than 3090 or has a big gap in performance to justify almost double price of 3090 I am willing to go with that.

Could you share some of your experiences with these cards?

The 3090 has vram on the front and back of the card which is harder to cool. Temps in the 90s aren't uncommon. Under a heavy gaming load mine used to hit 102c at which point the fans ramp aggressively.

I worried about the longevity of the card and water cooled it, which bought the temps down into the 70s which is about where I'd expect a stock air cooled 4090 to be under heavy load.

For setting up a scene, sims and Iray viewport performance I think you'd have to have both cards side by side to tell the difference, they're both quick. I render 4K stills and use the DS beta which has better 40 series support, I also run higher vram speeds than stock as the card is easier to cool and I have a lot of cooling. I get 60 - 70% better performance than I did with the 3090 in the last release version of Studio that I used for about 50w less power draw.

If I was choosing between the two cards now at the prices you listed I'd buy the 4090.

That was very informative. Thank you. I decided to go with 4090 as well.