Professional Graphics

The Cinema4D graphics engine in Cinebench is used for professional rendering so we do include results here which do not support an improvement but at least there is no decrease especially considering core count and TDP. The behaviour with OpenGL in R11.5 is typical to what we see, under performing due to the software.

Blender 2.73a claims support for 900 series GeForce Cards but clearly the software isn't fully optimised for Maxwell yet. We had similar issues with GTX 980 but at least there, with a slightly older Blender, CUDA wasn't slower than CPU but on 2.73 it is slower.

The thing is here, Blender advertise frequent optimisations to CPU render times for newer builds , we see this with CPU render (40s faster) and are forced to use these newer builds to support our new GPUs, but the support isn't right yet.

OpenCL support is not functional, we can see the GPU compute acceleration working by comparing against a run of RatGPU which shows a increase.

In the real world, some users do use professional workstation apps with consumer grade GPUs and students can't afford a Quadro or FireGL yet alone a Workstation. Ourselves and a small number of other review sites still carry on with SPEC's workstation benchmarks. A number of ISVs have recognised this and opened up their sw to consumer GPUs.

GTX960 runs Viewperf 11 great compared to the higher powered and more expensive GTX 760 Hawk. Architectural and driver differences are why AMD is faster here.