CHART: Cost-effectiveness of various NVidia cards for Octane

[colorlabs]

Hi guys, I'm looking to upgrade my video card, so I did some research. I looked up prices of various cards, and their GFLOP rating from wikipedia, and figured out which cards provide the most bang for your buck.

You can view the actual spreadsheet here or download as CSV here

So it looks like if you have more than one slot and don't need 3GB RAM, it's a much better idea to get two lower-end cards than one high-end card. As I have extra PCI slots in my motherboard, it looks like my best option is to get a second 460! Boring!

One question I have is whether the GFLOP rating accurately reflects Octane performance in the case of the 460/560. This is due to the warp scheduler issue that prevents 1/3 of the cores from working in Octane... Maybe I'll put together a new benchmarking thread with a form and stuff to figure this out...

[Jaberwocky]

Quote "One question I have is whether the GFLOP rating accurately reflects Octane performance in the case of the 460/560. This is due to the warp scheduler issue that prevents 1/3 of the cores from working in Octane... Maybe I'll put together a new benchmarking thread with a form and stuff to figure this out..."

Yes this is a question that may well need to be answered again now that Octanes using Cuda 4.I suspect that the answer will be the same.The Old chip has a bottleneck as far as Cuda apps are concerned.

The obvious check would be a GTX460 against say a GTX580 using one of the test scenes when the latest beta comes out sometime this week.If the problems been solved then the 460 should perform at about 336/512 IE about 2/3rd's of the speed of the 580 which uses a full fat chip.If it runs at under half speed then we have the answer.

[Timmaigh]

Good stuff this, thanks. I have both gtx590 and gtx460 2GB, so when the next (final 2.5) version of Octane will be released, i can do some benchmarks to compare them and settle the "superscalar issue" with 460 once and for all. Will need to install the 460 into my older compy first though

I will post back then.

[ROUBAL]

There is also the notion of power consumption that could be taken in account in the long range cost... Two GTX 460 for example could require more power than one GTX 480 or 580... just a thought.

[understand]

the best is the 460 2gb version. totally monster card and cheap

[steveps3]

I want to know how you guys can get graphics cards so cheap. The prices in that chart are way lower than I would have to pay.

[gueoct]

no comment from the octane team on this issue??? strange...