V-Ray GPU Rendering Platform Comparison: Skylake X, Xeon W, and Threadripper

Introduction

V-Ray, from Chaos Group, is a hybrid rendering engine that uses both CPUs (processors) and GPUs (video cards). This allows it to take full advantage of all available hardware in a workstation, in order to deliver amazing rendering performance. We have already tested current CPUs on V-Ray, but since GPUs are utilized as well it is important to look at how different platforms handle scaling across multiple video cards.

However, care does have to be taken when putting more than one video card into a workstation: there needs to be space in the chassis, the right type of PCI-Express slots in the correct layout on the motherboard, a large enough power supply, and plenty of cooling. In this article we are going to look at several platforms – motherboard chipsets along with a matching CPU – to see how well they handle the scaling of performance in V-Ray Benchmark.

Test Setup

To see how the different platforms scale in V-Ray 3.57.01, we used the following configurations:

These test configurations cover six major CPU platforms that are currently available, four from Intel and two from AMD. With the tested motherboards they support either 2, 3, or 4 GPUs at maximum – with a mix of x8 and x16 PCI-Express lanes per card, depending on the board and card layout. In our past testing with GPU rendering we found that running cards at x8 vs x16 made no substantial difference.

For the video cards themselves we used NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, a well-respected GPU for this application due to its high speed and fairly large RAM capacity with a reasonable price tag. Multiple cards were run on each platform, up to 2-4 depending on the board.

To determine performance, we ran V-Ray Benchmark 3.57.01 and recorded the results from each hardware combination. That test returns the number of seconds it takes to render a scene, so lower scores are better. Our findings are shown in the chart below, separated by platform and the number of GPUs – which are color coded for easy cross-platform comparisons.

Benchmark Results

Here are the results, in seconds, from V-Ray Benchmark for the platforms and number of GPUs we tested:

The main takeaway here is that the platform does not make any substantial impact on performance. There is a small amount of variance, within a second or two, but that is well within margin of error. Any of these platforms will do very well with multi-GPU rendering in V-Ray, though keep in mind that the chipset and motherboard will determine the total number of video cards that you can use in a system.

Conclusion

Based on our test results, the platform itself isn't a huge concern for V-Ray when it comes to GPU performance. All the chipsets we tested perform within a few percentage points of each other, though the number of video cards supported does vary by motherboard.

Since V-Ray uses both GPUs and CPUs, though, this needs to be balanced with performance results from the processors themselves. We've done that testing in a separate article, and it is well worth looking at if you are considering the purchase of a new workstation. We have put together recommended systems that take into account both CPU and GPU performance, and offer a range of options so that you can tailor them to your specific needs and budget.

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