Which card for a workstation?

[Nem]

Hi all

 

Im in the process of putting together a new workstation on the x99 platform and am thinking about which gpu to get. I will be playing the occasional game on the machine, but it will mostly be used for 3D work and compositing. These are the applications I typically use:

 

- Zbrush: 3D sculpting (entirely software rendered so gpu wont make a difference here)

- Mari: texturing (capable of handling multiple 32k textures, but I usually work at 8k)

- Maya: animation and simulations

- Nuke: compositing (like a node based after effects with a little bit of cuda acceleration here and there but nothing major)

 

The first 2 (zbrush and mari) are sometimes replaced by Mudbox depending on the situation

 

If I had to list, in order, how much I use each program it would probably look something like: Nuke > Zbrush > Mari > Maya

 

OK so onto the GPUs. I won't be getting a workstation card as they are too expensive for what they do. I'm considering the following:

 

1. GTX 770 (Gigabyte, 4gb, 1.14ghz) - $460

2. R9 280x (MSI, 6gb, 1ghz) - $475

3. R9 290 (Sapphire TriX, 4gb, 1ghz) - $475

4. GTX 760 (EVGA, 4gb, 1.08ghz) - $366

5. R9 280 (Gigabyte, 3gb, 950mhz) - $250

 

First of all, if money were no issue, which card (from the list) is going to be best for my work?

Next, when considering price/performance ratio, do one of the cheaper cards work out better?

 

Is there a preference for AMD (opencl) over Nvidia (CUDA) in the applications I use?

 

How much does vram matter for a workstation like this? Does clock speed matter? Do neither matter to the point where I can just get a cheap 760/r9 280?

 

thanks!

[soaringchicken]

The 770 hands down.

[Anthony10]

Maybe I'm wrong, but wouldn't getting a lower end cpu and higher end gpu be better? Or do these programs benefit more from the cpu?

[Enderman]

770

[ForsakenLive]

All the software listed support OpenGL acceleration, which is both supported by Nvidia and AMD. Some of the plugins do support CUDA acceleration and stuff like Maya does support OpenCL.

On these programs  there is no superb CUDA benefit that I know of; it does grant acceleration but it's not that massive, you usually end up using OpenGL, and sometimes OpenCL.

 

The R9 290 should perform better of the bunch, the price is right and the Tri-X model is a beast.

 

Some examples of OpenGL on Maya:

 

 

Yeah... the R9 290 is not listed there, but it should be at the top, as AMD architecture was upgraded from Tahiti to Hawaii. On some other examples AMD and Nvidia trade blows, but it's a very minor difference, unless CUDA enters the game, if fully supported it outperforms the Raedon team, but the software you mentioned only has CUDA on some plugins, that while speeding things up it shouldn't make a massive difference.

[Flight1sim]

770 for sure

[eLucid]

@Nem

 

None of the above. You've listed a bunch of consumer grade "gaming video cards" none of which are suitable/ideal for workstation use. If your main priority isn't gaming, purchase a workstation GPU for WORK.

 

The w7000 is one option.

[Nem]

Maybe I'm wrong, but wouldn't getting a lower end cpu and higher end gpu be better? Or do these programs benefit more from the cpu?

 

Most of these applications are cpu, ram and IO bound. They're not heavily dependent on the gpu (like games are) so that is where I'm willing to save some money

 

 

@Nem

 

None of the above. You've listed a bunch of consumer grade "gaming video cards" none of which are suitable/ideal for workstation use. If your main priority isn't gaming, purchase a workstation GPU for WORK.

 

The w7000 is one option.

 

I dont see the benefit of having a workstation card over a consumer card for this use case. As I mentioned, I'm not going to be pushing the gpu that hard with these applications (apart from maybe Mari). Besides, in an effort to save cost I've set my budget to around 500 (even that is a push), so the w7000 is way overpriced for me. Stepping any lower than a w7000 would be sacrificing performance to the point where these consumer cards would work just fine.

 

 

For the people that picked the gtx770, could you give reasons as to why?

 

I've just looked at some benchmarks, and even in games (which I know isn't my use case) the 290 tri-x is ahead in performance. Maybe I'm looking at the wrong benches but the 290 tri-x seems comparable to a 780 for much less $

 

Ideally I'd like to find some benches between the 770 and the 290 tri-x in openGL performance, and in cinebench performance but I can't seem to find anything like that

[Najuno]

Well the R9 290 is a really nice choice, awesome price/performance ratio and lots of raw power for even more than 1080p gaming. This card will last you for a good long while.

[ACatWithThumbs]

You said you use Nuke the most that uses Cuda so I would go with Nvidia.
If you need to do something very CUDA heavy go with a TITAN Black.(It has the same Cuda performance as the K6000)
https://developer.nvidia.com/ultimate-cuda-development-gpu

For light Cuda work I would say go with the 4GB 770 or 6GB 780.