Some GPU comparisons

[havensole]

Hi all. Just got my new gtx470's on Thurs., but haven't really had time to sit down and play with them until today. Anyway, I wanted to share some simple rendering results between my old cards (8800GT and GTS250) and the new bad boys. Setup was really simple as my license isn't active on this test rig. (System 2 in my sig). The scene was the default camera position and all of that from when the Space Ships model is loaded, no tweaking of anything. Yeah I know this probably isn't the best subject, but without having the license on this machine it would just have been a pain to keep loading the mesh and trying to get all the positioning and materials exactly the same. Here are the numbers:

System 2:
AMD Phenom x4 925, MSI K9N6PGM2-v2 mobo, 4GB ddr2 800 RAM

Test 1:
Scene: Space Ships || Direct Lighting || Samples/Pix: 16000
MSI 8800GT 512mb vRAM: Megasamples/Sec = 7.63-7.81 FPS = 14.56-14.93 Render Time = 19:59 minutes.
MSI GTX470 1280bm vRAM: Megasamples/Sec = 25.83-25.95 FPS = 49.26-53.48 Render Time = 5:55 minutes.

Test 2:
Scene: Space Ships || Path Tracing || Samples/Pix: 16000
MSI 8800GT 512mb vRAM: Megasamples/Sec = 4.15-4.2 FPS = 7.91-8.01 Render Time = 37:23 minutes.
MSI GTX470 1280bm vRAM: Megasamples/Sec = 16.8-17.71 FPS = 32.05-33.78 Render Time = 8:53 minutes.

I will run further tests tonight when I get to my other system (System 1 in my sig) which houses my other GTX470 (EVGA) and where my GTS250 is as well. I wasn't too surprised by the 8800GT as that is the card I have really been using since I first discovered Octane.When I saw the render time of the Direct Lighting test I pretty much figured that the Path Tracing test would be roughly double the render time. I was really happy to see that it is not linear between GPU's as the Path Tracing on the GTX470 was only a couple of minutes higher then the Direct Lighting. I really wanted to show the difference between a decent low end option and a decent high end option. I will make up some higher difficulty scenes to see if the numbers will still be as good.

[Michael314]

Hello,
that's interesting, because it's exactly the comparison between the card I currently have and the one which is just shipping to me.
I originally wanted to replace it by a 2 GB version of the GTX 285, but that card does not work in my computer (it doesn't even boot),
so I'm swapping it for a GTX 470 (which unfortunately has less RAM, but is the newer GPU generation).
I would be interested if anyone has a comparison between GTX 285 and GTX 470 for Octane.

Best regards,
Michael

[SurfingAlien]

also a comparison between GTX470 and GTX480 would be interesting... just to see if it's worth the extra price