Workstation Battle: AMD Radeon Navi vs. NVIDIA GeForce SUPER

Having tackled gaming performance on AMD’s RX 5700 and NVIDIA’s RTX SUPER graphics cards over the past couple of weeks, we can now turn our attention towards the creative side of the market. Admittedly, this article should have been posted weeks ago, but we had more than one wrench thrown into our plans, some of which we’ll talk about throughout the article.

It used to be that creative work done on a PC would imply you were using a workstation-class graphics card, but that’s not anywhere close to being the case today. Even AMD and NVIDIA have softened up on their respective workstation card pushes, and it makes sense. Radeon Pros and Quadros have reasons for their heftier price premiums, but most of the world can’t stomach them.

There are a couple of reasons why you’d still want to consider a Radeon Pro or Quadro over a Radeon or GeForce, but nowadays, that largely has to do with the software in question. If you’re using a high-end CAD suite that focuses its support around workstation-class GPUs, you should probably just suck it up and go that same route to avoid as much potential headache as possible. But for hobbyists or students, gaming cards can fill the void more often than not.

A common selling-point for workstation cards for quite some time has been support for 30-bit color in OpenGL. Once again proving that we’re never quite sure what to expect, NVIDIA just opened up that feature to its current GeForce and TITAN line when the Studio driver is used. We’re still digging for the final word on this, but AMD’s Radeon gaming cards had 30-bit support enabled in OpenGL since around 2014, however, applications like Photoshop and Premiere Pro would not enable it unless a workstation card was detected. Whether this changes going forward, we don’t know.

Let’s spend a minute taking a look at the cards being tested. For the sake of keeping things simpler here, we’re including only the GPUs being tested today in these tables. You can look at fuller lists in some of our other recent GPU content.

Regardless of the performance picture, we’re recommending anyone looking for a new graphics card for creative work to at least go with an 8GB option. You’ll be doing yourself a disservice by using less; maybe not right this minute, but surely before you’ll be looking to upgrade. We have a suspicion that the big reason NVIDIA didn’t increase the 2080 SUPER’s framebuffer is so that it didn’t eat more into the 2080 Ti’s market positioning, but it’s too bad nonetheless. Perhaps next-gen, we’ll see higher than 8GB become as standard as that is right now.

Chances are good that anyone looking at gaming cards are not going to be too concerned over error correction memory. It’s our understanding that in professional visualization, ECC is used primarily by the medical and energy markets, and not so much in design. That said, the option is available to those with higher-end workstation cards, but never on gaming equivalents.

Because NVIDIA offers 30-bit color on GeForce and TITAN now, the exclusive features list of Quadro slims a bit. As with the RPro cards, Quadros still carry a price premium largely because of the highly tuned drivers, and also performance optimizations for select high-end suites. At least with the case of NVIDIA, Quadro cards also offer far more NVENC streams than GeForce (20+ vs. 2), but a feature like that isn’t exactly relevant to the ProViz audience (it’s more relevant to Plex hosts).

In the workstation vs. gaming argument, the best point to make for RPro and Quadro is premium support. If you’re a gamer running into an issue, you’re not likely to be treated with priority, whereas that’s implied with workstation GPUs. If your work is critical, you need to weigh these factors.

Test PC & What We Test

On the following pages, the results of our workstation GPU test gauntlet will be seen. The tests chosen cover a wide range of scenarios, from rendering to compute, and includes the use of both synthetic benchmarks and tests with real-world applications from the likes of Adobe and Autodesk.

Twelve GPUs were tested suite-wide, but for our CUDA-only page, the non-SUPER 2060/2070/2080 and 2080 Ti were added to help bolster the results a bit more. Time didn’t allow us to run those through the rest of the suite, though the results on this CUDA page will largely represent scaling seen elsewhere.

Unfortunately, this article isn’t as standard fare as we’d like. We ran into a number of software-related issues that prevents the usual list of results from being seen. In particular, AMD’s Navi cards didn’t work in MAGIX Vegas Pro or SiSoftware’s Sandra, something we’re sure will be rectified before long. It’s doubly unfortunate that our AMD Radeon ProRender testing also had to be dropped due to a bug (which we talk about on the next page), as that would have been a third renderer for AMD cards, whereas NVIDIA has the bonus of four additional ones on the CUDA-only page.

Alas, nothing can be perfect. We’ll retest in due time, but for now, we still have many useful results to pore over. That all covered, the specs of our test rig are seen below:

Our benchmark results are categorized and spread across the following four pages. On page 2, we’re taking a look at neutral renderers with the help of Blender and LuxMark. On page 3, we’re heading down the CUDA-only path with V-Ray, Arnold, Redshift, and Octane.

Page 4 is home to our encoding tests, which are handled by Adobe’s Premiere Pro, MAGIX’s Vegas Pro, and a new entrant in our GPU tests: Agisoft’s Metashape. Metashape is a photogrammetry tool, but until we add more such tools to our suite (such as Reality Capture, coming soon), it’s being tossed into the encoding section. Finally, page 5 handles viewport performance across a range of popular suites.

And with all of that covered, let’s get on with it: