Graphics Card(s) for Blender / Rendering

[Cylon Agent]

I've been getting more and more into video editing, CG and Blender and thinking I may need an upgrade to speed up render times. I'm currently running a:

 

Xeon E5-2690 (8 core 2.9 - 3.8 GHz)

64 GB DDR3 (1600) 

GTX 1060 6GB and a Quadro 4000 (Quadro is used only to run the display to keep the viewport from freezing during renders)

Corsair RM 850 power supply

 

I've been thinking of a second GTX 1060, but 6GB is getting to be rather limited in 2020. A 1080 is a thought given the extra cores, clock and VRAM (two 1080's over time). Then I am also considering cards like a Vega 64 and even a 5700 XT. I do also game on this workstation, VR in particular, as it runs quite cool and has plenty of IO. Whatever card I get, I will likely double up on over time, so two Vegas or whatever and so one issue I'm having is comparing performance of two slightly older cards with one modern RTX card. No single right answer here but I'd appreciate any thoughts. 

Thanks,

[Crunchy Dragon]

I'm told GTX 1070s are beastly rendering cards, and they're also fairly cheap on the used market.

 

I'd strongly advise against Radeon Navi cards as they're having a lot of driver issues at the moment.

[GrockleTD]

Whatever cards you go with (personally not recommend it amd, those driver issues will kill your workflow) don’t forget to join the LTT folding team next fall for the currently annual folding month

[Fasauceome]

AMD graphics cards are excellent for blender. For the high end, you could opt for a Radeon VII, but for a budget minded approach, an RX 580 8GB is a great call.

[xAcid9]

Get an RTX card. Blender rendering with OptiX backend utilizing the RT cores is so much faster than any other render method but if you render a complex scene that need LOTS of VRAM then Radeon VII is better.

 

https://techgage.com/article/testing-blender-2-81-alpha-with-nvidia-rtx/

 

 

 

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=blender-281-optix&num=2

[Cylon Agent]

Thanks @xAcid9 Looks like the right move might be an RTX 2060/70 then, which would certainly help my gaming as well. 

 

Interesting thing about the Spring render benchmark is that CPU + GPU rendering is virtually the same as GPU alone. I've noticed this trend now with a number of renders and am at a bit of a loss as to why this would happen. Would results be more as expected (reduced times) with a larger render? Any thoughts as to what is going on there? An issue with tile size?