Is here anyone successfully using GTX680 with NITROUS viewport (NOT gpu rendering)?

I just ordered mine yesterday, and after what i read here i am very worried… :S

Core i7 870 @3,2Ghz
16GB RAM
GeForce GTX460
3ds Max 2012 SP2
OCZ Vertex 2 SSD

I’m using a GTX 680 with 4gb vram, Max 2013 is up to date with PU6. I did no extensive testing, just a quick iray test and some modeling. No problems so far.

One thing to note, the iray performance degraded by nearly 15% in comparison to my GTX 580 3GB vram. Maybe the new iray update is not kepler optimized or the GTX 680 is a really poor performer double-precision wise. My hopes are going toward 2013 when nvdia will release the kepler-refresh and the maxwell generation.

While Max has continued to increase its numbering (max 2011,12,13..) one thing has continued to be the same- ever since nvidia 8800 series was introduced in 2006 Max viewports couldn’t use more than ~70 cuda cores.

If you consider that 8800gtx has 128 cores and that gtx 680 has 1536 cores that run roughly at the same speed ~1ghz- and you know that only very few cores are being used by Max viewports, it isn’t hard math to tell that GPU load would be low.

I’d like Phil here to correct me, but that is completely Autodesk’s fault. Nitrous has nearly doubled % of GPU used, but its still only about ~150 cuda cores.

Max has never supported SLI/multi card for viewports. Considering gtx 680 has some 90% unutilized cores (more than 1000 unused cuda cores) there is no need for SLI support in the foreseeable future. VrayRT and iray are whole different game, and I’m not talking about renderers here- just the viewports.

Also, Max still only supports ONE single CPU core for the viewport manipulation- is it any wonder that it can at most utilize GPU hardware from 2006?

As I understand, allowing parallelism and usage of many cores is hard work. Than again, 2006 was what, 7 years ago now? Oh, that reminds me-

Happy New Year!

EoDEo

Ideas drift like petals on the wind. You have only to lift your face to the breeze.

FYI: the NVIDIA drivers posted just before the holidays (310.90) should give a +15% or better performance increase for Iray on the GTX 690, Quadro K5000, and Tesla K20.

Happy rendering,

- Phil

Hi all, I’m just wondering has there been any update on the performance reports of GTX 680s, after the PU6 update? I’ve searched high and low.

Our company has agreed to get an Evga GTX680 upgrade in a couple of weeks.

From the PU6 Readme “The NVIDIA® iray® renderer now supports the NVIDIA® Kepler chipset.” But to what extent..?

I just wonder am I ordering this card prematurely. The 2GB GPU memory will be more than welcome, especially over my current card. Although I’ve read some conflicting reports of Max only using ‘set number’ of cuda cores at most, and the rest are overkill. I hope this is not the case.

“Put into formulae, GPU ray tracing performance looks like this:

(CUDA Cores#) x (Clock Speed) x (GPU Architecture) = Relative Performance.

This means that for a given GPU architecture and clock speed, iray performance will scale linearly with the number of CUDA cores present on the GPU, and for a given architecture and core count iray will scale linearly with clock speed.” - http://area.autodesk.com/blogs/shane/the_iray_faq

I’m a subscription holder too, so equally has there been any leaks about improved integration with Kepler / Maxwell tech in Max Design 2014? We’ll be getting this on release.

Current Spec in Sig below.

3DS Max Design 2013 PU6
Lenovo E30
Xeon E31225
GTX560Ti CU II 1GB DDR5
Corsair Enthusiast TX650 V2
Win 7 64bit, 8GB Ram