OctaneRender 2020 – NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 Ti Performance

Introduction

First announced back in January, NVIDIA has released a new top-of-the-line video card, the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti. This card features the same 24GB of VRAM as the RTX 3090 but adds a few more CUDA, RT, and Tensor Cores as well as faster clock speeds. The trade-off for this extra performance is power. The TGP, or how much power a video card may use, has increased from 350W to 450W.

Professional applications such as OctaneRender from OTOY scale very well with the number of available CUDA cores and the speed of those cores. This card should see a bump in performance over the base RTX 3090, but we’ll need to look at real-world tests to see exactly how much of a gain it provides.

If you want to see the full specs for the latest NVIDIA GPUs we recommend checking out the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 Series product page. But at a glance, here are what we consider to be the most important specs:

As we noted earlier, the RTX 3090 Ti has the same VRAM as the RTX 3090, but has a slightly higher CUDA core. Price-wise, it is $500 more than the RTX 3090. On paper, it looks to be a great card for those that need the ultimate GPU performance.

One concern we have is that this is a 450W card – 100 watts more than the RTX 3090 – but uses the same cooler design. This could make it both louder and hotter than any other RTX 3000 series card, which can be a significant concern if your system does not have adequate cooling.

Test Setup

Listed below is the specifications of the system we will be using for our testing:

*All the latest drivers, OS updates, BIOS, and firmware applied as of June 8th, 2021

To test each video card, we used OctaneBench 2020.1.5. These tests were run twice on each GPU, with the best result being included in the graphs below.

Benchmark Results

Here are charts showing the performance of the new GeForce RTX 3090 Ti (in green) compared to the other cards we tested:

Performance Analysis

The raw performance of the RTX 3090 Ti lines up about where you would expect given its specifications. It is only about 4% faster than the existing RTX 3090 in Octane. Is that enough of a performance improvement for the extra cost? That is a difficult question as peak performance always comes at a premium.

It should be noted that this benchmark does not fill up the available VRAM on any current video card, so larger more complex scenes that need more than the 8-12GBs available would see different numbers. However, if that is not your case, the RTX 3080 Ti offers nearly identical performance to the RTX 3090.

How well do the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 Ti perform in Octane?

The RTX 3090 Ti offers only 3% faster rendering performance than the RTX 3090. This does make it the fastest single GPU option for Octane users. At $500 more than the base RTX 3090 yet only offering a few percent more performance, it is somewhat hard to justify. If you need the best of the best, than the RTX 3090 Ti is the way to go. If you don’t think you’ll notice that 3% difference, you can save yourself a few hundred dollars.

Also of concern is the much larger power draw, a full 30% higher than the base RTX 3090. This will make multiple GPU builds difficult due to both the large power draw as well as the potential extra heat. In our testing we saw power draw of over 400W with spikes even higher. Temperatures also averaged 5-10 degrees hotter in our open air test beds. For a single GPU this shouldn’t be an issue, but trying to have multiple RTX 3090 Tis in a system might be problematic. So far we have not seen any blower-style cards. We’ll have to wait for some more GPUs to do some more in-depth multi-GPU testing.