Traditionally the only way to shorten render times was to buy faster CPUs or more systems and render over the network. As a result once you had finished creating the models, textures and animations for your scene the expensive graphics card in your graphics workstation was left largely idle.
However as graphics cards have become more powerful and frame buffer sizes have increased it's now possible to use them to accelerate rendering. GPUs are so good at rendering because unlike a CPU which features a small quantity of highly complex cores, a GPU has hundreds or thousands of comparatively simple cores that are perfect for breaking down the complex task of rendering into lots of small bite size chunks.
As a result many rendering engines now support GPU rendering as well as or instead of the CPU, with dramatic performance gains from anything from 6x to 15x depending on the renderer. For this reasons its crucial to understand what hardware your chosen render engine can take advantage of, especially as this will change over time as patches and new versions of the software are released as well as new graphics drivers.
We supply a wide range of GPU rendering systems, from dedicated rendering servers to Graphics Workstations that can also be used for modelling and animation.
3XS Graphic WorkstationsThe 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.
2x Quadro M6000
2x Quadro M5000
GeForce GTX Titan X
Quadro M6000
2x Quadro M4000
GeForce GTX 980
Quadro M5000
Tesla K40
Quadro M4000
Quadro K2200
Dual Xeon E5 CPUs
Single Xeon 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.
8x GeForce GTX Titan X
8x Tesla K80
4x GeForce GTX Titan X
4x GeForce GTX 980 Ti
4x GeForce GTX 980
4x GeForce GTX 970
4x Tesla K80
2x GeForce GTX Titan X
2x GeForce GTX 980 Ti
2x Quadro M6000
2x GeForce GTX 980
2x GeForce GTX 970
2x Tesla K80
GeForce GTX Titan X
GeForce GTX 980 Ti
Quadro M6000
GeForce GTX 980
Quadro M5000
GeForce GTX 970
Tesla K80
Quadro M4000
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.
4x GeForce GTX 980 Ti
4x GeForce GTX Titan X
4x GeForce GTX 970
2x GeForce GTX 980 Ti
2x GeForce GTX Titan X
2x Quadro M5000
2x GeForce GTX 980
2x GeForce GTX 970
GeForce GTX 980 Ti
GeForce GTX Titan X
Quadro M6000
GeForce GTX Titan
GeForce GTX 980
GeForce GTX 970