2.4 pre-beta speed improvement on 460 gtx

[necko77]

i will NEVER in my life folow suggestions on this forum for hardware buying advice- fool proof command in my brain
Cubix, gtx 460 what the f..k is next !
i wish that octane render can use ATI cards, f..k this Nvida nabs, they just take money and give u nada !
as a matter a fact i dont think its clever to buy card for next year or we need some1 from nvida to tell us...people dont buy this - buy this

[n1k]

What's wrong with gtx460? I paid my 2gb version 210 eur. If I add one more I will get similar performance and price as gtx480 but with larger frame buffer and flexibility of having 2 card setup. This new 3gb gtx 580 is well over 600 eur and it will pass some time until it drops around 400 eur.

I agree it would be nice that ATi cards become supported so we can have more choice...

Cheers,
n1k

P.S. I suggest that we all post our results in benchmarking tread so we have better picture of speed differences among new cards.

http://www.refractivesoftware.com/forum ... 302#p44302

[Jaberwocky]

I Think a bit of perspective is called for here.

I bought a 1055T 6 core AMD processor at £160 to render up some scenes for work in Mental Ray after my Dual Core could not cut it.(4 Hrs per render)
Got all six cores going in Mental Ray on a scene with reasonable output in 45-50 Mins.

Same Scene in Octane with higher quality in 10-15 Mins.Not allowing for the fact that the trial and error to get the right camera angles and lighting in Mental ray used to take half an hour just to set up and test,cut short the render,adjust and try again etc.

Just one card even with 224 instead of 336 cores working has saved me a hell of a load of buggering about over the last few months,even with the Beta problems in Octane.

It's like a Ferrari 458 italia driver being caught and overtaken by a Veyron.

The Driver says " Bloody salesman...He did not tell me i would not be the fastest thing on the autoban,now i'm Pissed" as he passes the VW Golfs in the slow lane.

[Timmaigh]

So, now with CUDA 3.2 the GTX 460 uses all of it's cores (which previously didn't), but for some technical / architectural reasons the speed increase is only marginal, not nearly 33%?

Is that right?

Well, it was still not confirmed by Radiance or anyone else form Octane team, so for now its just a "rumour". But apparently there is the same performance increase on gtx460 as on 470, up to 20 percent...this is was promoted by Radiance as the good part of CUDA 3.2 (the bad part is broken multi GPU). However we were expecting cca 50 percent increase for 460 (20 + 33 percent because of 112 unlocked cores) and this AFAIK unfortunately didnt happen so far. Probably because there are only 2 warp schedulers for every 3 shader blocks in the 460´s design. That third block to be utilised requires top notch parallelism of the code, but i certainly do not know how much can be things computed in Octane made parallel. Maybe it hit its ceiling and it cant be done any more efficiently and in that case bad luck for us.
At least this is how i see the whole thing from my perspective and with my knowledge, i can be completely wrong ofc.

[Timmaigh]

I took the liberty to edit your post and show only the most relevant lines

So sorry to bring 'bad news', but few months ago i nearly decided to trade two 470's for two 460 2GB... glad they weren't in stock then so i only sold one (before the price plummeted down like crazy) and waited, but then went busy for other things and only recently get back to Octane, and i was going to put my bet on the to-be-released-next-week GTX 560 2GB when i read about its possible problem with Octane (being similar to GF104 etc) ... and then this news come in rather unexpectedly before i make any bad purchase choice... Oh wait i'm not cheering you up this way

Well seriously i think if you've already used these cards for long enough then they will have paid themselves.. I actually bought two GTX 470's last April and wasn't actually pushing them hard enough for long until their prices were about to go down so it was a lesson for me too: when it comes to technology, don't buy it until you almost can't live without it!

That is the thing, i have not used them properly yet. I was waiting for the Setsugen 2 cooler to come out, so until then i was fine using gtx470 at work only.
You are right about the lesson: I could not expect to switch to Octane, so i do not regret the Gulftown CPU, in the end its nice at least once in a life to own really top CPU (as a computer enthusiast i am )...but those cards are entirely my fault, i acted prematurely and stupid, i wanted to have great machine ready for anything and ignored the issues bound to SLI, so it serves me well. Anyway i am never going to buy 2 GPUs, the one high end GPU is better choice than 2 midrange anyday, anytime.