It’s been a while since our last in-depth viewport performance look, so we’re going to get up to speed with the latest drivers and software. We’ve integrated SPEC’s latest SPECviewperf 2020 into our testing, and also include a little Blender – so let’s see how things fare with our seventeen gaming and workstation GPUs.

AMD’s Radeon ProRender has come a long way since the last time we tested it, with the latest iteration adding ray tracing acceleration support for new RDNA2 Radeon graphics cards. For this article, we’re going to focus on GPU rendering (with 21 GPUs), with CPU and heterogeneous rendering to be explored later.

Ahead of 2021, we wanted to take one last look at rendering performance with the current range of NVIDIA GPUs and the renderers that target them. Those include some staples: Arnold, KeyShot, Octane, Redshift, and V-Ray, with a little Blender on the side. Many have also been tested with RTX on and off, so read on and see how well each one of these eleven GPUs fare.

With Blender 2.91 recently released, as well as a fresh crop of hardware from both AMD and NVIDIA, we’re tackling performance from many different angles here. On tap is rendering with the CPU, GPU, and CPU+GPU, as well as viewport – with wireframe testing making a rare appearance for important reasons. Let’s dig in.

AMD’s top dog Radeon RX 6900 XT has landed, and we’re taking a look at its performance across a variety of 1440p and 4K workloads – with and without DXR. With the 6900 XT, AMD is taking care of gamers who want a premium product and have no qualm splurging on it – so let’s see how it fares against the competition.

NVIDIA has just added a fourth model to its current-gen GeForce lineup, and following in the footsteps of the RTX 3070, the RTX 3060 Ti becomes the newest most affordable Ampere option ($399). We’re going to be taking a look at NVIDIA’s latest card across our usual fleet of games, including a few DXR ray traced games with and without DLSS.