2x 1080 or 1x Titan XP

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Piotr Wozniacki

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2x 1080 or 1x Titan XP

PostWed Feb 14, 2018 10:07 am

Rohit Gupta wrote:With Resolve 14, its best you go with a single GPU which is used for both UI and compute. It will give you better performance than a GUI + Compute card generally.
.


With the above in mind, will otherwise identical system perform better in Resolve:

- with 2x GTX 1080 (of which one is used for UI and both for computing)
or
- with 1x Titan XP (for UI and computing)?

Please help me with the above dilemma asap - it's very important for me for some reason. TIA

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Andrew Kolakowski

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Re: 2x 1080 or 1x Titan XP

PostWed Feb 14, 2018 10:39 am

It may depend on type of work.
I think it was clarified bit more that in case of 2 good the same cards it still may be better.
If you for example use noise reduction than dual card setup should be faster. If you use simple timelines single card setup maybe more fluid. This is how I understand it, but I'm not 100% sure.

Resolve engine seems to be rather not clever one. If you send job to 2 cards it assumes they have the same capabilities. In case they are very different things go wrong as whole process always needs to wait for slower card.
With GUI card issue is that data has to come to it from processing one which is not that crazy fast, so you waste some time here.

It would be cool if Resolve tried first to use GUI+compute one and if needed then 2nd one. Then for rendering it should use different strategy trying to get max possible speed.
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Piotr Wozniacki

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Re: 2x 1080 or 1x Titan XP

PostWed Feb 14, 2018 10:51 am

It most definitely would depend on the work scenario, Andrzej - plus it goes without saying that 2x 1080 will always be faster than a single 1080. But:

- Titan XP will give me 12GB vs. just 8GB of 2x 1080
- personally, have no idea on how much faster Titan XP is than the 1080; if it is "faster enough" - this along with less overhead of data wrangling plus the optimization in Release 14 might all make for a faster experience. And the beauty of my plans is I have a good buyer for both my 1080s, so I'd not have to add much monies in order to buy a brand new Titan X (if any at all; my buyer must be one of those gamers who believe SLI is the ultimate solution, hence his readiness to get 2 identical cards). My over-loaded X99 mobo would get less cluttered, and I could put everything back into the case which doesn't have room for all my stuff with 2x double-wide GPU cards; my M.2 and USB3.1 could work at their peak speeds, too (in order to squeeze as much as possible on this mobo, I relegated my Deckink and NVMe drive outside the case on 3M PCIe extender bands, and had to slow the M.2 to PCIe Gen. 2)... I could even replace my current 8-core CPU with the 10-core i7 - without the need for new chipset and CPU socket. All in all - a breath of new life to my machine for relatively small cash...

Unfortunately, I have no idea how much better Titan XP's performance is over that of the GTX 1080 - hence the post :)

Piotr
Last edited by Piotr Wozniacki on Wed Feb 14, 2018 11:14 am, edited 7 times in total.
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Andrew Kolakowski

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Re: 2x 1080 or 1x Titan XP

PostWed Feb 14, 2018 10:55 am

Yes, it's not that obvious.

Look at number of CUDA cores and RAM bandwidth.
I don't think it's that much faster (30%?) so I would say 2 cards should be still faster and definitely better for render stage.
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Andrew Kolakowski

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Re: 2x 1080 or 1x Titan XP

PostWed Feb 14, 2018 11:51 am

Actually Titan Xp spec is much better ( I though it's smaller difference) than 1080 and you have fairly big performance difference:

https://linustechtips.com/main/topic/78 ... i-resolve/

so maybe it's better at the end make it simple and use 1xTitan Xp.
Your CPU is going to be bottleneck for 2 GPUs most likely anyway.
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Re: 2x 1080 or 1x Titan XP

PostWed Feb 14, 2018 1:23 pm

I would be surprised if two 1080 would not be faster. However it has less memory so you could run out of memory in 4k situations. Myself I would look at the 1080 TI instead, and potentially have 2 of those.

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Piotr Wozniacki

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Re: 2x 1080 or 1x Titan XP

PostWed Feb 14, 2018 1:53 pm

The specifics of my - rather unusual - situation calls for reducing the number of full speed, double-slot cards inside my current PC; for the next one in the future (possibly a dual-CPU workstation), there will be no such necessity and a dual GPU will be the obvious solution.

Also - even though I realize the advantages of 1080ti over 1080 - I already have two of the latter, so for now its either keeping the system in the current configuration (which BTW works really well), or selling both 1080s and replacing them by a single, much more potent GPU...

Piotr
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Re: 2x 1080 or 1x Titan XP

PostWed Feb 14, 2018 4:22 pm

Puget Systems did a helpful comparison of single and dual GPU performance with various PCIe configurations. There doesn't seem to be a clear advantage to having dual cards for their tests unless you have two 16x PCIe slots. https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Titan-X-Performance-PCI-E-3-0-x8-vs-x16-851/#DavinciResolve
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Andrew Kolakowski

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Re: 2x 1080 or 1x Titan XP

PostWed Feb 14, 2018 4:41 pm

Differences are so small. Measurement is not very accurate, so I would not make such a conclusion.
Way more interesting is fact that single Titan v. dual gave only about 20% speed difference for NR test (but 2x for blur!)
It just shows that some things may scale fairly well with more cards, but others not very well at all.
As far as I know people quite often get more cards for NR- well, maybe you should think twice :)
Based on this:
https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/artic ... 12GB-1108/
and this:
https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/artic ... n-Xp-1060/
you may be better with single Titan V instead :)
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Re: 2x 1080 or 1x Titan XP

PostWed Feb 14, 2018 4:55 pm

Dual cards don't always scale linearly, but my testing has found a clear advantage, especially with motion effects. 13 fps for a single 1080ti but 20 for dual with heavy noise reduction on a Prores 1080p29.97 clip.
Last edited by Chip.Murphy on Wed Feb 14, 2018 5:13 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Andrew Kolakowski

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Re: 2x 1080 or 1x Titan XP

PostWed Feb 14, 2018 5:00 pm

Those are not bad numbers. Looks like it all varies depending on project structure.
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Piotr Wozniacki

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Re: 2x 1080 or 1x Titan XP

PostThu Feb 15, 2018 8:55 am

OK, so here is the most comprehensive answer to my question:
pic_disp.jpg
pic_disp.jpg (87.69 KiB) Viewed 2694 times

As can be seen, with Basic Corrections +4 Power Windows +3 OpenFX +TNR, the newest TitanV is almost twice as fast as a single 1080. Considering additional benefit of getting rid of any overhead due to data wrangling between 2 cards, I would get the same (or better) overall performance with a single Titan V than I'm getting now with 2x GTX 1080.

The only caveat is price :( and my current 8-core i7 becoming a serious bottleneck...

Piotr
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Re: 2x 1080 or 1x Titan XP

PostThu Feb 15, 2018 9:18 am

2x 1080 or 1x Titan XP

Up to 12.5, 2 x 1080
From 12.5 and upwards, single Titan XP or 1080 ti
No need to think too long...
*MacMini M1 16 Go - Ext nvme SSDs on TB3 - 14 To HD in 2 x 4 disks USB3 towers
*Legacy MacPro 8core Xeons, 32 Go ram, 2 x gtx 980 ti, 3SSDs including RAID
*Resolve Studio everywhere, Fusion Studio too
*https://www.buymeacoffee.com/videorhin
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Piotr Wozniacki

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Re: 2x 1080 or 1x Titan XP

PostThu Feb 15, 2018 9:30 am

Oh yeah? And how can you be so sure of that, with so many potential workflows, media types etc.?

The picture I posted comes from the first review I ever found (https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/artic ... 12GB-1108/), comparing single GPUs with various usage scenarios and including ALL relevant nVidia cards (with 1060 being the very minimum) - so I envy you being so confident in your opinion :)

PLUS, we're talking UHD@50p (or even DCI 4K) here...

Piotr
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Re: 2x 1080 or 1x Titan XP

PostThu Feb 15, 2018 9:55 am

I understand you're envying me, I'm right... 8-)
*MacMini M1 16 Go - Ext nvme SSDs on TB3 - 14 To HD in 2 x 4 disks USB3 towers
*Legacy MacPro 8core Xeons, 32 Go ram, 2 x gtx 980 ti, 3SSDs including RAID
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Piotr Wozniacki

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Re: 2x 1080 or 1x Titan XP

PostThu Feb 15, 2018 10:27 am

Sam - with your deep knowledge - could you please advise on the following (please read my entire thread to get the picture of what I'm after here):

- Suppose I go for the swap, sell my two 1080s and buy the Titan XP (the V is much too expensive, with its many features not even being used by Resolve); how much of a bottleneck would my current 8-core CPU become and would it be enough to replace it with the only faster model which doesn't require replacing motherboard, i.e. the i7-6950X which only has 2 cores more?

Hint: my current CPU/GPU have almost perfect balance with prevailing type of work I do; e.g. caching to DNxHR HDR of an UHD@50p timeline with basic color correction (RCM), mild stab and NR plus 1-2 OFX taxes CPU at 50-60% and GPU at up to 98-100%; playing back the cached media uses 75-90% of CPU power and up to 25% of GPU. On the other hand, playing back long-GoP media (like the H.264 from my GH5) can tax the CPU at 95-100%! With Intra codec (like the XAVC-I from my FS7), playback of UHD@50p only uses 40-50% of my current CPU...

Piotr
AMD TR 2990WX CPU | MSI X399 CARBON AC | 64GB RAM@XMP3200 | 2x RTX 2080Ti GPU | 4x 3TB WD Black RAID0 media drive | 3x 1TB NVMe RAID0 cache drive | SSD SATA system drive | AX1600i PSU | Decklink 12G Extreme | Samsung UHD reference monitor (calibrated)
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Re: 2x 1080 or 1x Titan XP

PostThu Feb 15, 2018 11:21 am

I saw the pic, but anyway you can see a lot of pics on macvidcards or same. My opinion comes from 2 major facts.
First, BMD developps the app and makes a lot of tests, especially Dwaine afaik, and I think we can sometimes listen a bit of what they reckon, which is to opt for a single strong and very much "nvrammed" GPU now... Only a few examples (like 4 GPUs) would really take advantage of a gui dedicated extra card. Still BMD recommendation fyi.
Also, given that CPUs are not to be changed so easily and frequently and that Resolve is strongly GPU-centric anyway, I don't think that this GPU case needs the change of CPUs, except if you really experience lacks in plenty of others apps (and if you're sure the cpu is faulty).
Now, my personal 2 cts; I have a lot of works and usually try not to waste my time with things like that, I'm no gamer... This leads me to often adopt the best solution, which is the upgradable one imho : thus buying a gtx 1080 ti won't prevent you to buy a second one in case you're not satisfied, that's all ;)
*MacMini M1 16 Go - Ext nvme SSDs on TB3 - 14 To HD in 2 x 4 disks USB3 towers
*Legacy MacPro 8core Xeons, 32 Go ram, 2 x gtx 980 ti, 3SSDs including RAID
*Resolve Studio everywhere, Fusion Studio too
*https://www.buymeacoffee.com/videorhin

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