Official Statement from Otoy towards GTX 980/970

[erges]

Thanks Jonas for this info, actually a think about 780Ti, I wonder if Maxwell series bid it.

[Gumz]

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$..

I think you are wrong.
There are benchmarks showing a GTX 980 beating a GTX 780 Ti (and the GXT 970 being on par with 780 Ti) in the Cycles engine in Blender (which is also a CUDA engine)
This to me suggest that the slower performance in Octane by the 9xx series has to do with the Octane code rather then being a hardware issue.

http://www.sweclockers.com/image/diagra ... d24b51cac2

[glimpse]

I think you are wrong.
There are benchmarks showing a GTX 980 beating a GTX 780 Ti (and the GXT 970 being on par with 780 Ti) in the Cycles engine in Blender (which is also a CUDA engine)
This to me suggest that the slower performance in Octane by the 9xx series has to do with the Octane code rather then being a hardware issue.

I hope so =) but what You comparing is sort of normal deal..680 (based on gk104) was beating 580 (based on gk110), now they doing the same with Maxwell's lower end chip beating higher-end from Kepler architecture..but at the same time they starting to position separate category of cards (Titan line) in between of GTX & PRO range.. for the price between 1k$ & 3k$ (between what gamers are used & what professionals are willing to pay).

Performance is not the only metric..if their SKUs paired with more vRAM will be released for way higher price, these might not be so tempting for most.. =) TitanZ was released in GTC & presented as entry level compute card, that means nVidia understanda what type of consumer is interested in it - whether it's gamer that have too much money or developer/scientist that has bit too little (to grab Tesla card).

[grimm]

I think you are wrong.
There are benchmarks showing a GTX 980 beating a GTX 780 Ti (and the GXT 970 being on par with 780 Ti) in the Cycles engine in Blender (which is also a CUDA engine)
This to me suggest that the slower performance in Octane by the 9xx series has to do with the Octane code rather then being a hardware issue.

http://www.sweclockers.com/image/diagra ... d24b51cac2

Hmm that is not what we are seeing with our tests.

http://blenderartists.org/forum/attachm ... 1414359815

My 980 comes in just below a 780 and is about 2 min. slower than the fastest 780ti. There might be something the devs can do to speed up the Maxwell 2 cards but we don't know yet. Nvidia might be able to improve the drivers too? It's a waiting game right now.

[abstrax]

Just for your information: I'm currently working on improving the performance of Octane on the GTX 980. We don't have a GTX 780 at the office but several Titans and Titan Blacks. For now I'm only working on path-tracing, so I can't say anything about the other kernels, but I could reduce the speed difference to about 10-20% compared to a Titan Black. In at least one big interior scene the difference is even only a couple percent. The differences were somewhere in the range 30-60% before.

I think/hope that there is still room for improvement, but it's quite tedious. I think at least half of the speed difference is due to the CUDA toolkit. Now that I better understand the situation I will try to get in touch with NVIDIA next week. But as a first guess, I would say that the GTX 980 will stay slower than a Titan Black.

Cheers,
Marcus

[Gumz]

Just for your information: I'm currently working on improving the performance of Octane on the GTX 980. We don't have a GTX 780 at the office but several Titans and Titan Blacks. For now I'm only working on path-tracing, so I can't say anything about the other kernels, but I could reduce the speed difference to about 10-20% compared to a Titan Black. In at least one big interior scene the difference is even only a couple percent. The differences were somewhere in the range 30-60% before.

I think/hope that there is still room for improvement, but it's quite tedious. I think at least half of the speed difference is due to the CUDA toolkit. Now that I better understand the situation I will try to get in touch with NVIDIA next week. But as a first guess, I would say that the GTX 980 will stay slower than a Titan Black.

Cheers,
Marcus

Good to hear, and thanks for the effort
I will wait a bit with upgrading.

[bepeg4d]

great, thanks Marcus for letting us know
it seems quite difficult to find GTX 780 in this days, so good to know that the 980 could be a good alternative.

ciao beppe

[grimm]

Just for your information: I'm currently working on improving the performance of Octane on the GTX 980. We don't have a GTX 780 at the office but several Titans and Titan Blacks. For now I'm only working on path-tracing, so I can't say anything about the other kernels, but I could reduce the speed difference to about 10-20% compared to a Titan Black. In at least one big interior scene the difference is even only a couple percent. The differences were somewhere in the range 30-60% before.

I think/hope that there is still room for improvement, but it's quite tedious. I think at least half of the speed difference is due to the CUDA toolkit. Now that I better understand the situation I will try to get in touch with NVIDIA next week. But as a first guess, I would say that the GTX 980 will stay slower than a Titan Black.

Cheers,
Marcus

Thanks Marcus, very good news. Do you think that this is similar to why the Kepler cards were slower than Fermi until the newer drivers? I'm thinking that Nvidia is just mostly concentrating on games right now for the 900 series. Later they might work on getting CUDA performance better?

[erges]

Thank you for this work, I think I wait for the next result before buying 780Ti or 980....

[Gumz]

Here are one of the main reasons why I'm waiting with upgrading: http://www.kitguru.net/components/graph ... -december/

Looks like we are getting 8GB versions this year. Imagine loading up a computer with 970's...it would be cheap, consume low power (relative) and give you a big 8GB playroom.
But I'm sure it would be too cheap and efficient for Nvidias taste, so I doubt we'll see the driver improvements needed.