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Image by Tommy5 from Octane forums / Image submitted for the Octane January License competition / All rights Tomislav Corak / Blender 2.49 + Octane 0.81a
166'661 Triangles / 2332 Samples/pixel / 52,44 min using 8600GT @ 256 MB / 1280*640 original size / resized to 1000*500 for Luxology forums

This render by Tomislav Corak (used with permission) is clocking 52.44min rendertime using a single 8600GT
For some people 52min is too much for a single frame, its like getting back to CPU rendering

Here's a little math based on the real specs of other GPU
Not 100% accurate because its only calculated using the GFLOPS values
But that will give you a good idea of how fast the current GPUs are

The 8600 GT he used
32 cuda core and 113 GFLOPS = x1 = 52 min render time

A single 8800 GT
112 cuda cores and 504 GFLOPS = x4.46 = 11.65 min render time

A single GTX260 (216 core version)
216 cuda cores and 874 GFLOPS = x7.73 = 6.72 min render time

A single GTX285
240 cuda cores and 1062 GFLOPS = x9.39 = 5.53 min render time

52 min down to 6 using a 300$ GPU, that's really fast
And based on the next GPU from Nvidia specs, this render could be done in 2 min 30 seconds only

This topic is also to show that old GPU (the 8600GT has only 32 cuda core) is not really a good idea if you want true ludicrous speeds
Octane render is really the fastest Unbiased renderer in the world, and the only one YOU can download and test

Sam wrote:For some people 52min is too much for a single frame, its like getting back to CPU rendering

To provide a different perspective from someone who isn't able to use Octane yet: Getting a full-resolution render from an unbiased renderer in less than an hour is freakin' awesome. I am just finishing up a render in LuxRender right now that has taken three weeks to complete.

Sam, you are already corrupted by too much time spent with your Octane!

how does this cpus compare with cpus? Is there a way to measure, internally that is? In a quick run I've done I had Indigo cleaning on par with octane, or perhaps faster, it was a core i7 vs 9500gt fight.

Is there such a benchmarking possibility in Indigo without paying the lovely 595 Euros? Because after my tests with Octane, Nvidia GT240 is not on par with Phenom 9550 ... it is much faster .

the best way to compare it to compare the GFLOPS rating.

you can find GFLOPS ratings for GPU's on wikipedia geforce 8, 9 and GTX200 series pages.
compare those to GFLOPS ratings for CPUs that you find via google on various pages,
and you had a direct comparison in processing speed.

octane scales linearly in speed with GFLOPS,
as do CPU based renderers aswell. (although they suffer a slight penalty with more cores/threads due to locking, which does'nt happen on a GPU)

the only thing that sometimes bottlenecks and renders the GFLOPS based speed measurements slower with octane is with low-end cards who have very narrow VRAM busses. (eg 64bit or 128bit busses)

a GTX260 is about 16x as fast as a Q6600 quad core CPU based on GFLOPS score. (with all 4 CPU cores)
our tests show that calculating the different in GFLOPS for a q6600 between the GTX260,
does result in the exact same speedup. (when compared to running the exact same algorithms on a CPU)

the low-end 9500GT should be more or less equal to a core2 i7 CPU, and it also suffers from the memory bus-width bottleneck.

Radiance

Because the cpu is used some other duties in Octane what overall effect does that have on performance and does using a pci-e x16 1.1 bus vs 2.0 matter a lot? Will it matter more for multiple gpu?

haste wrote:Is there such a benchmarking possibility in Indigo without paying the lovely 595 Euros? Because after my tests with Octane, Nvidia GT240 is not on par with Phenom 9550 ... it is much faster .

Indigo has no other limitation but watermarking and 0.7 megapixel resolution.

Here is the Wikipedia page with the info. Sam you may want to correct some of your numbers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_20 ... al_summary

My only error is 240 core for the GTX260
But there's versions of the GTX260 that have 240 cores
The GFLOPS is for the 216 core edition

Thanks for the Wikipedia link
I used wikipedia for 3 days to make a huge list of GPU for the documentation
But its a secret... shhhh .... You will be able to report any errors on the huge list I made later

Im planing to get GTX 260 with 1,7GB mem soon, so i'll test speed boost in praxis.