Official Statement from Otoy towards GTX 980/970

Mon Oct 20, 2014 9:45 pm

any news on this subject guys ?

regards,
Poly

Mon Oct 20, 2014 10:49 pm

polytek wrote:any news on this subject guys ?

regards,
Poly

Nothing conclusive. The results are quite mixed and I still need to wrap my head around them. I will let you know, as soon as I know more.

Tue Oct 21, 2014 3:54 am

thanks for the info,

poly

Tue Oct 21, 2014 6:13 pm

Hi, I'm going to buy 780 or better to wait your test results? The new Maxwell vertion should go faster?

Wed Oct 22, 2014 9:39 am

I bought a 780 now. In Cycles i have seen the 970 actually come pretty close to it (7 vs 8 mins with the 5.2 kernel from Nvidia), but yeah. Who knows. Maybe we are still to see what it can do. Right now im not so impressed anymore. One thing where they really managed to put the honey around my mouth was the power consumption, but (surprise, surprise) during rendering it is the same as the 780 and apparently some overclocked variants of the 970 can even beat it.

Plus if you have a older motherboard, you might need a BIOS update. No problem as Windows user,
but with Linux it might just bite you and honestly i dont want to take that chance.

Wed Oct 22, 2014 9:46 am

abstrax wrote:
polytek wrote:any news on this subject guys ?

regards,
Poly
Nothing conclusive. The results are quite mixed and I still need to wrap my head around them. I will let you know, as soon as I know more.

Interesting response. In the early days of Octane the software was developed with tight integration of Nvidia's exciting GPU technology. I suppose this is no longer the case. Is Nvidia somehow outpacing Octane?

Just about every reviewer raves about the 970/980 series. Cuda (at least for Octane) is somehow not making the grade on this one though. Hope the team can give Maxwell some love soon...

Seeker

Wed Oct 22, 2014 10:17 am

Jonas wrote:I bought a 780 now. In Cycles i have seen the 970 actually come pretty close to it (7 vs 8 mins with the 5.2 kernel from Nvidia), but yeah. Who knows. Maybe we are still to see what it can do. Right now im not so impressed anymore. One thing where they really managed to put the honey around my mouth was the power consumption, but (surprise, surprise) during rendering it is the same as the 780 and apparently some overclocked variants of the 970 can even beat it.

That's why it's worth to read forum for Octane related issues & some respected review sites before You make purchase =)
power usage under heavy CUDA workloads was lifted up by them (nvidia even pulled some test results from tomsHardware..)

Wed Oct 22, 2014 11:08 am

Seekerfinder wrote:
abstrax wrote:
polytek wrote:any news on this subject guys ?

regards,
Poly
Nothing conclusive. The results are quite mixed and I still need to wrap my head around them. I will let you know, as soon as I know more.
Interesting response. In the early days of Octane the software was developed with tight integration of Nvidia's exciting GPU technology. I suppose this is no longer the case. Is Nvidia somehow outpacing Octane?

Just about every reviewer raves about the 970/980 series. Cuda (at least for Octane) is somehow not making the grade on this one though. Hope the team can give Maxwell some love soon...

Seeker

Yea, now that I think about it, wasn't OTOY on stage at the GPU (NVIDIA) conference? They've always seemed to have close ties to the company. You'd think they'd have early developer access to Maxwell architecture so that Octane would be ready for it when the new GPUs launched.

Wed Oct 22, 2014 11:25 am

riggles wrote: Yea, now that I think about it, wasn't OTOY on stage at the GPU (NVIDIA) conference? They've always seemed to have close ties to the company. You'd think they'd have early developer access to Maxwell architecture so that Octane would be ready for it when the new GPUs launched.

I might be completely wrong, but it's probably not in best interest from nVidias to sell more GTX cards for computing purposes - it seems That with Titans (Blacks & Zs too) nVidia is trying to put separate category between GTX & PRO lines =p let's cross fingers with hope that until we get bigger brother released, Octane will be taking the best out of this new architecture! =) & that we will not see prices like those for TZ - 3k$..

Wed Oct 22, 2014 1:00 pm

glimpse wrote:I might be completely wrong, but it's probably not in best interest from nVidias to sell more GTX cards for computing purposes - it seems That with Titans (Blacks & Zs too) nVidia is trying to put separate category between GTX & PRO lines

That's one theory that may well be true. However, the fact is that Otoy only got a hold of a card some time after it was released and their approach was a bit like "Oh, there's a new card out? We'll check it out when we have time". This is what surprised me since in the past a newer card typically meant a faster Octane. This obviously changed with Kepler but still, I would have thought that Otoy are on the ball regarding what's happening in Nvidia's lab.

I am wondering if there is a sort of crest reached with hardware now and perhaps Otoy's focus is more on increasing (and maintaining) features than on keeping up with the fast pace of GPU architectures. And yet the latter cannot be ignored when developing a GPU product... What happens when Maxwell becomes mainstream and Fermi gets phased out. Where does that leave Octane users? Not everyone is enamored with the cloud...

I'd love to hear Otoy's position on this.

Best,
Seeker