Rhino 8 - GPU / Graphics Card Tests

Choosing hardware and in particular a GPU / Graphics Card isn’t a straightforward task, especially when like many CAD users do you have a mix of software tools that you switch between. It is a challenge to find a good balance between GPU price and performance, with this report we set out to fill in some of the gaps to help you choose the right card for your applications.

Similar to our previous report from 2022, Graphics Cards for Rhino v7, this report goes beyond Rhino performance alone, we also look at V-Ray for Rhino, KeyShot, and Twinmotion for rendering with GPU. Each of these rendering software packages responds well to the presence of a high-performance Graphics Card (GPU), like the range of cards from PNY NVIDIA that we’ve used in our benchmarking.

For these tests we look at GPU performance with:

• Rhino Viewport Performance
• Rhino Raytrace Performance
• V-Ray for Rhino
• KeyShot
• Twinmotion

In the three and a half years that have passed since we last ran our in-depth GPU tests we’ve seen both another major software release, Rhino 8, and a new generation of chip architecture from NVIDIA called Ada Lovelace. The cards we’ve tested are all designed for professional graphics as opposed to gaming; the old ‘Quadro’ naming convention for these professional cards has been dropped in favour of the RTX prefix. Gaming cards, on the other hand, are still called GeForce.

In our tests we’ve concentrated on testing cards that are readily available at the time of writing and that includes three Ada generation cards plus two built on the previous Ampere architecture. Rhino 8 is also now well established with our user base and has undergone a number of service releases.

The graphics cards we have tested were supplied by PNY Europe and are listed below, Simply Rhino do not supply these products but they are widely available either as a separate component or as part of a workstation purchase.

• RTX A1000
• RTX 2000 Ada
• RTX A4000
• RTX 4000 Ada
• RTX 5000 Ada

We hope you found our GPU / Graphics Card test results useful. If you would like to also look at Operating System, Processor, and Memory recommendations for when using Rhino 8 for Windows we'd suggest checking out our support page Hardware Requirements for Rhino for Windows. 

These tests were made possible by the support of Workstation Specialists, who hosted us and provided the machine the tests were carried out on, and PNY Europe, who provided the NVIDIA Graphics Cards for the tests.

Contact the team at Simply Rhino if you require further information or help with your GPU decision making for Rhino and its companion products, we're always happy to hear from you.