Blender 2.90 Performance With GeForce RTX 3080, 18-Way NVIDIA CUDA/OptiX Comparison

Complementing yesterday's large GPU compute comparison with the GeForce RTX 3080 across many different workloads, today's article is looking at the Blender 2.90 render performance for this consumer Ampere $699+ graphics card.

Like with the numbers shown yesterday, the GeForce RTX 3080 is a serious upgrade over the RTX 2000 Turing series and older generations. With this Blender 2.90 comparison and testing the CUDA and OptiX back-ends, the comparison GPUs are going back to the GeForce GTX 900 "Maxwell" era hardware.

Blender's CUDA performance remains great but the OptiX back-end really screams when it comes to performance on NVIDIA RTX GPUs where the RT cores can be exploited for great performance. The cards tested for this comparison based on availability included:

- GTX 980
- GTX 980 Ti
- GTX 1060
- GTX 1070
- GTX 1070 Ti
- GTX 1080
- GTX 1650 SUPER
- GTX 1660
- GTX 1660 SUPER
- RTX 2060
- RTX 2060 SUPER
- RTX 2070
- RTX 2070 SUPER
- RTX 2080
- RTX 2080 SUPER
- RTX 2080 Ti
- TITAN RTX
- RTX 3080

The test system was still the AMD Ryzen 9 3950X with ASUS ROG CROSSHAIR VIII HERO, 16GB of DDR4-3600 memory, 2TB Corsair Force MP600 NVMe storage, and was running Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 continued running gracefully with the 455.23.05 driver.

Here are the Blender 2.90 numbers for the GeForce RTX 3080 Ampere against Turing, Pascal, and Maxwell via the Phoronix Test Suite.