GTX 970 SLI, 45 seconds - how come this is my optimal way to render?

Hello.
It was a lot of fun to play around with this.

I’m running 2 GTX 970s using SLI, so I can render 2 tiles at the same time.
The coolest thing to do is to set the tile size to 480x540, because then both GPUs work at the same time and each one is rendering exactly half the image.

But what surprised me is that this is NOT the most efficient way to render!
By lowering the tile size I could cut off a few more seconds.

480x540 - 50 seconds (divides image into 2 even pieces)
1024x1024 - 1 min 27 sec (only uses one GPU)
512x512 - 52 sec
256x256 - 49 sec
240x270 - 47 sec (divides image into 8 even pieces)
480x270 - 45 sec (divides image into 4 even pieces)
240x540 - 46 sec (divides image into 4 even pieces)
128x128 - 1 min 1 sec (now it gets slower again)

My optimal tile size is 480x270 at 45 seconds!
That splits the image up into 4 pieces, allows both my graphics cards to work at the same time, and lets each card render 2 pieces.
But there was a very noticeable difference of 1, sometimes 2 seconds, depending on if these pieces were horizontal or vertical.

This was really interesting to me!
Does someone know why this is the most efficient way to render?

Thanks for reading!

I can’t really answer your question on efficiency in different tiling set ups but I found that my GPU rendered best at the same tiling as your best time i.e. 480x270, Granted, I don’t have two graphics cards set up in a SLI (that sounds really terrific) just one card (GTX 1060 with 6 GB ram) but the time was the best for me at the same tiling amount that you used. My speed was 1’ 19.28" which is by comparison much slower than your time.

Thanks for posting you times and set up. That makes comparing times a lot better when you know the whole set up being used.

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I am also running 2 GTX 970 in SLI and I found similar results:

480x540 - 50 seconds

1024x1024 - 1 min 11 sec

512x512 - 49 sec

256x256 - 45 sec

240x270 - 43 sec

480x270 - 41 sec

240x540 - 41 sec

128x128 - 58 sec

I did try some other configs but in the end you got the sweet spot here!
Dividing the image in 4 pieces was the most effective way!

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