Blender Cycles Render Engine Benchmarks With NVIDIA CUDA On Linux

Well, those results are a surprise... But before anyone goes to the forums to share their two cents, it's surely a software issue right now with Blender / kernel_sm_61.cubin or perhaps an anomaly with this particular driver release / CUDA 8 RC. You can see proper GTX 1000 vs. GTX 900 series benchmarks in my GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 Linux articles, including CUDA with deep learning tests and more. Once a new Blender release is out, will gladly run some fresh Pascal vs. Maxwell benchmarks.

Anyhow, these are the numbers for these reference Cycles render engine tests with CUDA... But for now mainly just interesting to look at the Maxwell numbers until Pascal is sorted out.

Again, I'll be working on some OpenCL tests up next to see if the AMDGPU-PRO driver stack is in good enough shape for Blender Cycles benchmarking.

At least you hopefully found these GeForce GTX 900 reference figures interesting. I'll work on testing some lower-end cards shortly. If any Phoronix Premium members have other Blender test requests, feel free to let me know.

If you want to see how these results compare to your own CUDA-enabled Linux system, simply install the Phoronix Test Suite and run phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1607119-LO-NVIDIAGEF31. Now that there's the automated Blender test profile for the Phoronix Test Suite / OpenBenchmarking.org, we'll finally have benchmarks of this 3D creation software in our future reviews.