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1 rtx 3090 versus 2 rtx 3060s

M

Mr. Jones

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I'm trying to build a system robust enough for animation in Blender with fairly heavy scenes (4k textures, lots of light bounces, etc.).

As I understand it (hardware isn't my area of expertise), the 3060ti, 3070, and 3080 could all be problematic for 3D work because the relatively low VRAM might not be up to the challenge of rendering out complex scenes. I'd been looking at the 3090, but two 3060s would have the same total amount of VRAM and would be roughly half the price. I'm assuming the scaling isn't quite that straightforward, but would the performance drop-off be significant?

Of course this is all dependent on even being able to find any of these GPUs for sale, but I'd appreciate any thoughts.

Thanks!
 
Alex Glawion

Alex Glawion

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You'll have to look at benchmarks in your render engine of choice to be able to compare those. If it's cycles you're using, A 3090 is about as fast as 2x 3060. The 3090 does have 24gb of ram, though, while the 3060 only have 8. VRAM doesn't stack (at least not with low-end or midrange gpus that don't support nvlink), so even having two of those would mean your scene has to fit into each of those 8gb's of VRAM.

It really depends on how complex your work is. If it's fairly simple, the dual gpu route would be much better and cheaper. If you can, go check some of your typical scenes with GPU-Z and see how much VRAM they use (if you already have an older PC, or a friend or colleague has one that you can test this on)

A good indicator for comparing gpu render speed is the amount of CUDA cores a GPU has.
 
M

Mr. Jones

Guest
You'll have to look at benchmarks in your render engine of choice to be able to compare those. If it's cycles you're using, A 3090 is about as fast as 2x 3060. The 3090 does have 24gb of ram, though, while the 3060 only have 8. VRAM doesn't stack (at least not with low-end or midrange gpus that don't support nvlink), so even having two of those would mean your scene has to fit into each of those 8gb's of VRAM.

It really depends on how complex your work is. If it's fairly simple, the dual gpu route would be much better and cheaper. If you can, go check some of your typical scenes with GPU-Z and see how much VRAM they use (if you already have an older PC, or a friend or colleague has one that you can test this on)

A good indicator for comparing gpu render speed is the amount of CUDA cores a GPU has.

Sorry, I should have specified I'd be using Cycles in the original post, so that answered my question perfectly.

Much appreciated!
 
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