GTX 590 Speed, Memory and Temperature
The GTX 590 has got 2 GTX 580 GPU's on a single slot card with 2x512 CUDA processing units. Yes that is more than the higher end cards (Quadro, Tesla...) have onboard. For the money I spend on this gamercard I can buy 2 or three if they get toasted while heavily rendering. I get more bang for the buck than the high end cards. With careful cooling and maybe adjusting the clock speed I can squeeze all out that I need.
The GTX 590 is clocked down a bit because there is only one fan. Actualy this does not matter for me, I also tought about lowering the clock more to get less temperature. I monitored the temperatures and then decided not to clock down, I got a lot of fans in my case and will add another only for the GFX card tomorrow. Without additional cooling I get around 85°C-89°C, I expect to get this down using the additional fan.
As for memory consumption on typical scenes you have to be aware that the GTX 590 that has got 3GB RAM on board splits it up for the two GPU's, so in reality you can throw 1.5GB of Data on the card. I tried out some fancy polygon intensive stuff that used only 1GB. Of course it is not all about the polygon and texture load, you have to be careful to also calculate the output size of your image. It uses also memory for your amount of pixels for each color channel (3 for RGB). As long as you do not render out very big images and check your textures/polygons you can happily work on normal scenes.
testing DOF and foilage. 1.5 Mio Faces, 1536x698 pixels
8 Minutes rendertime while sucking 750 Watt of energy
DOF comes for free!
When mixing the GTX 590 with a GTX 580 with 3GB, iray will still only use 1.5GB of RAM. Think like this: iray always uses the lowest memory amount of all your cards!
Since I am still testing I decided not to buy 2 x GTX 580. I had multiple decisions driving me to that solution:
- Power consumption: 2 x GTX 580 uses more power
- PCIE Slots: I want to be flexible and don't want to use up all x16 busses
- Airflow: I can easily cool one GTX 590
- Flexibility: As soon as newer generations arrive I can invest in those (that hopefuly have more RAM onboard). 2xGTX 580 were more expensive at the time of buying my GTX 590
- If I decide that I want to switch to 2xGTX 580 I can do so when the prices drop in future
Power Consumption
One thing I was eager to find out is the power consumption since the GTX 590 eats a lot of power.
I measured around 650-700 Watts under full load (Monitor, Spacepilot, Wacom, CPU, and GFX turned on). On Idle my system eats around 230 Watts, this is less than a halogen lamp (300Watts) ;)
Quality
I am quite impressed on the physical "correct" renderings using iray. The quality of light/shadows, reflections/refractions and bump mappings is stunning. All this renders in a reasonable time. You may get some noise. Actualy I like the grainy "photographic" feeling. I think it is a good idea to render biger and then scale it down in post for the final image. this should minimize grain. Of course you can also render longer, iray can be very fast depending on what you have in your scene.
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| iray Rendertime 2:44 |
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| mental ray Rendertime 2:44 |
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| In iray shadows are smoother and the scene gets more light distributed into difficult areas |
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| Subtle shadow differences in iray, me likes! |
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| Reflections/refractions are awesome in iray, physical correct, great! |
DOF/Motion Blur/SSS/customizing and tweaking
DOF (Depth of field) comes for free in iray, renders fast and looks amazingly smooth. You just have to turn on DOF in your 3DS Max camera and dial in the F-Stop you want for the effect. The Camera DOF F-Stop is independent of the settings you make in the exposure control!
Until here everything is pretty much cool. Iray is nice and easy, you have nearly the "make nice image" button. This is ok to test your mr scene to see how it looks when physicaly correct and the tweak your mr scene accordingly. All the tweaking like motion blur, SSS and special shaders is not supported by iray. Maybe this is something to come in future but for now I'm ok with it.
Conclusion (For now)
iray is great to test scenes and adjust you regular mr renderings for a physical correct look. For product design I thing you got your "Make nice" button there. It needs still more evolution but runs stable and produces nice imagery. I am still making regular renderings using mr and VRay because I can tweak the look and speed of renderings on how I want it. I post more as soon as I have some more material, feel free to ask questions and share tips ;)
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