NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Through GeForce RTX 5080/5090 GPU Compute Performance
Kicking things off with the latest Blender 4.3 release. The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 900 Maxwell GPUs continue to be supported but especially for the GeForce GTX 900/1000 GPUs pre-RTX with the ray-tracing cores the OptiX performance is very slow... But even since the GeForce RTX 2080 series, Blackwell with the newest GeForce RTX 5080/5090 graphics cards continue pushing the performance forward.
Even using Blender's CUDA back-end rather than OptiX shows the staggering performance gains made from Maxwell to Blackwell.
The GeForce RTX 5080 can render Blender's Barbershop scene with CUDA in a mere 7% of the time it took to render on the GeForce GTX 980.
The GeForce RTX 40/50 series continue with a big lead too in power efficiency over prior generations.
Or when using Blender 4.3's OptiX renderer, the RTX 5080 rendered the Barbershop scene in just 5% the time it took to render on the GeForce GTX 980 from a decade ago.
With great strides in power efficiency over the past decade too with the NVIDIA GPUs in these Linux tests.
NVIDIA GPUs remain the leading choice for Blender power users thanks to the long-standing reliably GPU accelerated support with this open-source 3D modeling software. The Intel oneAPI and AMD ROCm/HIP support has come together in recent years but still not nearly as mature or widespread hardware support as what's found with the NVIDIA graphics processors.