Blender 2.93 Rendering & Viewport Performance: Best CPUs & GPUs

[PAGETITLE=Blender 2.93 Rendering Tests: CPU, GPU, Hybrid & NVIDIA OptiX][Top Ad] Get the latest GPU rendering benchmark results in our more up-to-date Blender 3.6 performance article. Last month, the Blender Foundation marked the end of the 2.X era with its 2.93 release. Next up will be a major update in the form of 3.0, which will come sometime later this year. While there's a lot to look forward to with 3.0, Blender 2.93 proves itself to be an explosive release, one that's still very much worth being excited for. In 2.92, Blender gained its Geometry Nodes feature, and in 2.93, it's been vastly augmented, with 22 new nodes, and a mind-boggling amount of potential coming with them. The Still Life project, seen below, makes heavy use of Geometry Nodes, so if you're wanting to dig in and explore how they work, be sure to head over to the Blender demo files page and snag it. If you do go there, you should also check out the bottom of the page, as there are many more cool Geometry Nodes demos to play with. Also new in Blender 2.93 are EEVEE upgrades, which involve a rewritten depth of field algorithm that improves accuracy. As you'll see in our respective performance graph below, there have also been notable performance improvements that makes it essential to upgrade to 2.93 if you use EEVEE in your workflow. If you're a Grease Pencil user, you'll likely also want to quickly move to 2.93, as major updates also hit that, including efficiency improvements, and the ability to export to SVG or PDF to further edit in other applications. To get a fuller look at what's new to 2.93, you should check out the official features page. If you want to really get your hands dirty, you could also hit up the even more detailed release notes page. 2.93 isn't just the final 2.X release, it's also an LTS release, ensuring that users who adopt it will be able to expect minor updates (including security) until the release of the next LTS (likely two years from now). As we usually do, we're diving into Blender 2.93's performance in this article, taking a look at both rendering (to the CPU and GPU), and viewport performance (on the next page). We recently did a round of testing in Blender and other renderers for a recent article, but since that was published, we decided to redo all of our 2.93 testing on an AMD Ryzen 9 5950X platform to ensure that our CPU isn't going to be a bottleneck for the viewport tests. Before we jump into performance, here's a quick overview of AMD's and NVIDIA's current lineups: AMD's Radeon Creator & Gaming GPU Lineup Cores Boost MHz Peak FP32 Memory Bandwidth TDP Price RX 6900 XT 5,120 2,250 23 TFLOPS 16 GB 1 512 GB/s 300W $999 RX 6800 XT 4,608 2,250 20.7 TFLOPS 16 GB 1 512 GB/s 300W $649 RX 6800 3,840 2,105 16.2 TFLOPS 16 GB 1 512 GB/s 250W $579 RX 6700 XT 2,560 2,581 13.2 TFLOPS 12 GB 1 384 GB/s 230W $479 Notes 1 GDDR6 Architecture: RX 6000 = RDNA2 Currently, AMD doesn't offer a current-gen GPU for under $479, which means for anything less expensive, you'd need to go back to the original RDNA generation. That's not something we'd suggest if you're a heavy Blender user, as we've encountered stability issues in the past. Unfortunately, some of those still exist with the current RDNA2 generation, but they're less common. One of the biggest perks to AMD's lineup is the amount of memory offered on the top-end cards, easily beating NVIDIA's similarly-priced options. However, that bigger frame buffer comes at the expense of weaker bandwidth, with NVIDIA taking a lead there thanks to its use of GDDR6X. And on the NVIDIA note: NVIDIA's GeForce Creator & Gaming GPU Lineup Cores Boost MHz Peak FP32 Memory Bandwidth TDP SRP RTX 3090 10,496 1,700 35.6 TFLOPS 24GB 1 936 GB/s 350W $1,499 RTX 3080 Ti 10,240 1,670 34.1 TFLOPS 12GB 1 912 GB/s 350W $1,199 RTX 3080 8,704 1,710 29.7 TFLOPS 10GB 1 760 GB/s 320W $699 RTX 3070 Ti 6,144 1,770 21.7 TFLOPS 8GB 1 608 GB/s 290W $599 RTX 3070 5,888 1,730 20.4 TFLOPS 8GB 2 448 GB/s 220W $499 RTX 3060 Ti 4,864 1,670 16.2 TFLOPS 8GB 2 448 GB/s 200W $399 RTX 3060 3,584 1,780 12.7 TFLOPS 12GB 2 360 GB/s 170W $329 Notes 1 GDDR6X; 2 GDDR6 RTX 3000 = Ampere NVIDIA's current-gen lineup is more complete than AMD's, although with the market being what it is, even the lower-end parts are going for much higher prices on the market than they should be. Fortunately, it seems like there is some light at the end of the tunnel, with decreased cryptocurrency mining gains starting to result in better prices online from third parties. We can only hope this continues to trend, and we can return to normalcy sooner than later. Nonetheless, the de facto "ultimate" GPU from NVIDIA is the GeForce RTX 3090, as it offers a monstrous frame buffer, and plenty of bandwidth to go along with it. The 3080 Ti, with its 12GB frame buffer, also becomes an alluring choice, with anything under that providing a more modest 10GB or 8GB frame buffer. The RTX 3060 could be intriguing to those who want 12GB on the cheap, but the performance seen throughout our graphs will show that it does come at the expense of falling further behind the RTX 3060 Ti than you might imagine, based on paper specs. While it's more memory, it's also slower memory, with the 3060 Ti offering about 25% better bandwidth - but at the expense of a smaller frame buffer. We're hopeful next-gen cards will be even more generous with memory sizes. Onto a quick look at our test system: Techgage Workstation Test System Processor AMD Ryzen 9 5950X (16-core; 3.4GHz) Motherboard ASRock X570 TAICHI (EFI: P4.30 04/14/2021) Memory Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro (CMW32GX4M4C3200C16) 4x8GB; DDR4-3200 16-18-18 AMD Graphics AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT (16GB; Adrenalin 21.5.2) AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT (16GB; Adrenalin 21.5.2) AMD Radeon RX 6800 (16GB; Adrenalin 21.5.2) AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT (12GB; Adrenalin 21.5.2) NVIDIA Graphics NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 (24GB; GeForce 471.11) NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti (12GB; GeForce 471.11) NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 (10GB; GeForce 471.11) NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti (8GB; GeForce 471.11) NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 (8GB; GeForce 471.11) NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti (8GB; GeForce 471.11) NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 (12GB; GeForce 471.11) Audio Onboard Storage AMD OS: Samsung 500GB SSD (SATA) NVIDIA OS: Samsung 500GB SSD (SATA) Power Supply Corsair RM850X Chassis Fractal Design Define C Mid-Tower Cooling Corsair Hydro H100i PRO RGB 240mm AIO Et cetera Windows 10 Pro build 19043.1081 (21H1) AMD chipset driver 2.17.25.506 All product links in this table are affiliated, and help support our work. All of our testing is completed using up-to-date test PCs, with current versions used for Windows, the chipset driver, the EFI, and also the graphics drivers. For NVIDIA GPU testing, we used the current 471.11 Studio driver, while for AMD, we used Adrenalin 21.5.2. AMD has more recent drivers than this, but they've caused us issues with some of our renders, so we had to stick to 21.5.2. We submitted this issue through the Radeon bug reporter tool, so hopefully we'll see different results soon enough. Here are some other general guidelines we follow: Disruptive services are disabled; eg: Search, Cortana, User Account Control, Defender, etc. Overlays and / or other extras are not installed with the graphics driver. Vsync is disabled at the driver level. OSes are never transplanted from one machine to another. We validate system configurations before kicking off any test run. Testing doesn’t begin until the PC is idle (keeps a steady minimum wattage). All tests are repeated until there is a high degree of confidence in the results. GPU: CUDA, OptiX & OpenCL Rendering. We're going to kick off our look at Blender 2.93 performance with the help of three projects, including two classics, and the new Still Life one. Because using NVIDIA's OptiX API with accelerated ray tracing makes such a notable performance difference, we're including those respective charts after each of the CUDA/OpenCL ones. Let's start with one of the true classics, BMW: In our CUDA vs. OpenCL battle, AMD sits far behind NVIDIA's competition, with the lowly 3060 Ti managing to beat out the RX 6900 XT. That painful delta for the red team is made even worse when OptiX is brought in, as that same 3060 Ti cuts a 32 second render time down to 21 seconds. AMD has historically performed better in the more complex Classroom project, so let's pore over that next: Indeed - AMD performs a lot better in the Classroom project over the simpler BMW one, and as we've commented on before, we're not sure why that's the case. It's been the case for about as long as we've been testing the project, however, so it's nice to see the red team redeem itself a bit here. That said, adding OptiX ray tracing acceleration to the picture changes the overall performance scaling quite significantly, with the RTX 3060 Ti suddenly matching the RX 6900 XT. For this article, we decided to give the new Still Life project a good test, since it's one of the first official projects in a while that has seemed suitable for benchmarking (eg: it has little wasted time before the GPU is engaged in the render). Let's take a look at that one: There's quite a bit of interesting data here to chew on. For starters, with the non-OptiX renders, NVIDIA still manages to hold a demanding lead, while with the OptiX API engaged, we're seeing nice gains, but not of the same level that we have seen in the previous tests. Still, no one is going to balk at an improvement render speed of 20% or so. The EEVEE render engine doesn't yet take advantage of OptiX accelerated ray tracing, so it gives us another apples-to-apples look at AMD vs. NVIDIA: We mentioned before that EEVEE in 2.93 brings forth some huge performance improvements, and hopefully the graph above helps paint that picture well. Truly, the differences are staggering, and because of other EEVEE enhancements, your final render in 2.93 should look even better than 2.92. It's a win/win all-around. On the...

Blender 2.93 Rendering & Viewport Performance: Best CPUs & GPUs

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Rob Williams