For a while I’ve been hearing that generally Blender’s rendering performance with CUDA is close to 30% better on Linux versus Windows. I was always curious, but not being that technically inclined, I felt like installing and configuring my NVIDIA drivers and PRIME might be too difficult. Well, it kind of was. I’ve tried many different distributions from Debian to Solus. Lots of trial and error, generally bad results. Even if I managed to run Blender with my graphics card, I couldn’t get it to appear in the CUDA settings panel.
Fast forward a little time and Canonical announced that Ubuntu 19.10 was going to ship with proprietary NVIDIA drivers on the ISO and better integration. I’ve decided to have another go at Linux and to my surprise - my GTX 1060 worked out of the box and appeared in the CUDA settings panel in Blender.
And it’s true. My render times are close to 25% less. However, that’s not even the best boost in performance I’ve noticed. To my utter disbelief, my Solid shaded viewport could run ~800k poly animations at close to 30fps. Holy moly! That runs at 6fps in Windows. I am talking about a 600% improvement. Six. Hundred.
I’m not going to do a proper benchmark, but I wanted to share this just in case someone else might be interested. I also should responsibly advise that your mileage may vary. Some people report insane gains, others report modest improvements for which they feel like they’ve wasted the time setting Linux up, especially if they weren’t very technically inclined, like me. And that’s kind of what I initially had thought as well - that the improvements were modest if any. There also is the question of what is bottlenecking your projects. People report substantial performance gains with kinematics under Linux, but otherwise maybe it’s not worth the effort.
For me it was, though, since I wanted to work with animations that deal with all sorts of kinematics. I had already started saving up for a “beefier” PC upgrade in the GTX-2080 Ti + AMD Ryzen 9 3900X range. Imagine my surprise when I could suddenly do 30fps animations of my 6-armature models with my GTX1060+i5 7300HQ in the viewport, in Linux. There’s no way I could do that with Windows… not a chance, I’ve even tried a fresh installation of Windows 10 Pro with just Nvidia drivers from their website, and Blender 2.8.
So that’s my rough render technique tip. If you have the chance and maybe you’re knowledgeable around Linux, might be worth giving it a shot.
