[Edeluc]

Dear CFD-Users,

I am using Ensight for transient simulations and focus on volume rendering but it is painfully slow at the moment - Therefore I want to do a hardware upgrade. As I already have an SSD and use relatively small meshes (~0.5 - 2 Million cells) I can exclude the hard drive and the RAM from the hardware upgrade and want to focus on the graphics card.

The Nvidia Quadro Series offers the M4000 and the M2000. Basically summing them up the M2000 offers half of the performance for half the price. The detailed information can be seen at:

http://images.nvidia.com/content/qua...US-FNL-WEB.pdf

My question to you now is whether someone already has some experience regarding the task (volume rendering with Ensight 10.2) and could give me some advice whether the M2000 card would suffice or if I should move to the M4000.

With best regards,
Lucas

[flotus1]

Which graphics card are you using right now?
What you should do first is monitor CPU, RAM and GPU utilization during the rendering task to make sure the GPU is actually the bottleneck.

Here are some Benchmark results for the software:
http://perftest.ensight.com/table
Apart from wireframe representations, Quadro cards (to be more precise: their driver optimizations) seem to have no benefit over GTX cards...which is not surprising.
A GTX 1070 will give you almost three times the raw performance of a Quadro M4000 for a price lower than a Quadro M2000.
Btw: the current architecture is Pascal, so if you still want to use a Quadro card you should really consider the "P"-versions instead.

[Edeluc]

Dear Alex,

I am using a GeFore GTX 750 Ti (2GB VRAM) at the moment.

I did some benchmarking throughout the last week - I will shortly comment on the results:

As I already have a SSD drive, the data loading is not the problem. When volume rendering, the CPUs peak only for a short amount of time (when some settings are changed). I therefore conclude, that the problem is the GPU. It would also fit with the recommendations from EnSight, that a GPU with a sufficiently large VRAM (>= 4GB) is recommended:

https://sites.google.com/a/ensight.c...rendering-faq/

In the document above, there are also some other advantages of the desktop workstation GPUs (in my case the Quadro series) over the gaming GPUs (in my case the GTX series).


To conclude I agree that on paper the GTX series provides more performance for the money and the optimized drivers do not seem to bring the advantages stated (at least for my application).

Thank you for your help and the performance test web page,
Best regards,
Lucas

[upadhyay.1]

Dear Lucas,
So, what did you buy finally? If M2000, is it working fine?
regards,
Ayush