How much benefit can a premium GPU offer for reducing render times?

[markilling]

I recently got commissioned to do a lot of animation work on a very tight deadline and have a generous budget to make it happen. The major bottleneck comes down to rendering time. I am trying to assess how beneficial a more premium GPU could be for rendering with Arnold GPU. Currently I am operating with only a 1060, so anything new would be an improvement, but I am not sure if it would be marginal gains or a game changer in terms of time saved.

I realize that render farms are also an option, and maybe something I will use. The difficulty though, is that I am relying on using Houdini Engine within Maya, which I expect will cause a lot of problems for trying to get my files to render on someone else’s system. It can be tricky enough when all of the files are local.

Any insights would be greatly appreciated.

[thiago.ize · Accepted solution]

The speedup over a 1060 will be scene dependent, but https://techgage.com/article/mid-2021-gpu-rendering-performance/2/ has arnold benchmarks for two scenes which might help give you a rough idea of the speedup you'd see. One other thing to keep in mind is that you should get a GPU that has enough memory for the type of scenes you want to render, though if it's already working on a 1060, I suspect any of these newer GPUs will likely have more memory anyways.