Compute Benchmarks

So I expanded out our compute testing to better match our recently expanded CPU test suite. A lot of people, gamers included, use their PCs for video production, mining, and rendering. So it is important to look at every aspect. Sadly I ran into issues with a few of our tests with the RTX 2080 Ti, but rather than not include them I want to address them. We can update them later when they are fixed, but it is important for people to know if/when they might have issues.

So the first test I ran was the GPU Compute benchmark in Passmark’s Performance Test 9. I like this because they test in a few different ways and give you an overall score. The 2080 Ti did top the chart here, but I was a little surprised it was so close to the 1080 Ti.

Now the V-Ray benchmark showed what the RTX 2080 Ti is capable of. This might not be a surprise given the ray tracing focus of this card, but I don’t think V-Ray actually takes advantage of the new RT cores. This is just from raw performance. I was surprised to see the Vega 64 struggle in this test though.

Next, we have Cinebench using the OpenGL test, well frankly I thought this one was going to get tossed out. All of the Nvidia cards were right in the same range and the results didn’t really make much sense. I assumed we were CPU limited but testing the Vega 64 said differently.

Cinescore, lol well this one ended up being a mess. I really like this benchmark because they test encoding performance across every single format you can think of and then do it at every resolution all the way up to 8k. That is because Cinegy does really studio production software for the big boys, not just what people use at home for YouTube or Twitch. Sadly though the RTX 2080 Ti results look a little low, that is because a few of the tests would just fail and that dropped the overall score. Even worse, the Vega 64 didn’t complete the test at all because it failed every test in an Nvidia specific format.

Then last but not least we have Blender, this was the test I was most excited about. Blender is used a lot and people use their CPU and or their GPU so it is good at looking across the platforms to see what works best. Sadly the RTX 2080 Ti crashed on this one as well. I spoke to Nvidia about this one and I’m told that Blender needs to be updated to CUDA 10 to fix this issue, so we will just have to wait for that before seeing numbers. Currently though the Vega 64 complete curb stomped the 10 Series Nvidia cards. Having asynchronous compute is important here and we know the RTX 2080 Ti does well with asynchronous compute, so it will be interesting to see how this turns out later.