The Best Performing Graphics Cards for Rendering

GPU Rendering Performance

The most important characteristic to look out for in a graphics card for rendering is the number of cores, as this is the part of the GPU used to process all the calculations. Second, make sure you choose a graphics card that has sufficient RAM to fit all the geometry and textures inside. If the frame buffer is not large enough, then some assets will overflow into main system RAM which runs much slower than the RAM on the graphics card.

While its possible to slash render times by using GPUs its still important to have a fast CPU as this is heavily used during the load and setup processes. Other renderers, such as Thea Render also use the CPU during rendering, achieving an even more dramatic speed up than CPU or GPU rendering alone.

In this guide we'll look at how different hardware configurations perform in some of the most popular renderers. As renderers are coded very differently from each other it's important not to use this data to compare one renderer to another; however you can use it to see how effective upgrading your render systems can be.

Iray 2015 Rendering Performance

NVIDIA Iray is a physically based rendering engine that is available as a plugin for 3ds Max, Cinema 4D, Maya, Revit and Rhino. The graph below shows the rendering performance you can expect to see in 3ds Max when rendering using the NVIDIA Iray plugin on various CPUs and GPUs. The scores are shown as relative to a single Intel Xeon E5 CPU.

Octane Render Rendering Performance

OTOY Octane Render is an unbiased physically based renderer and uses NVIDIA CUDA to unlock the power of GPUs. The graph below shows the average Ms/s (mega samples per second) on a variety of different GPUs, with a higher sample rate meaning shorter render times.

FurryBall RT Rendering Performance

AAA Studio Furyball RT is GPU renderer that has unbiased and biased modes and is available as a plugin for 3ds Max, Cinema 3D and Maya. The graph below shows the performance you can expect on a variety of different GPUs relative to a single GeForce GTX Titan graphics card.