I have an smal computer laying around I want to use for rendering, so I´m buying a used GTX 770 card to get some speed, however it seems like the motherboard wich is an MSI AM1i only supports x4 speed on the PCIe port, does this slow down the GPU performance drastically?
cant say for sure, but i would guess so. just make sure the case is roomy enough and the air flow is good.
Hi eivber, the x4 speed does not influence render performance at all.
On heavy scenes loading data in to the GPU it is slower as x16 but still GB per second, doesn´t really matter.
As Daedalus mention, check GPU themp it throttles down if the card get to hot.
Cheers, mib
Is the “x4” only the speed of the datatransfer to the VRAM? In that case it’s no problem.
I’m happy to hear I still get the full calculation speed.
It’s gonna be inside a Mini-ITX cabinet so temperature is a concern yes, it´s pretty cramped in there, the cabinet is in a room that´s cold and there’s much air around the cabinet, so I´ll give it a go and just monitor the temperature for some time to see how it´s doing.
Will CPU-speed play any vital role when doing GPU rendering?, just asking, cause the CPU in this machine is pretty slow.
From personal experience it COMPLETELY DEMOLISHED gaming performance, so I can say it probably does alter performance, as the information being sent to the GPU is running at 4x speeds which are really slow.
I just bought it the other day, I had a bad feeling about the deal as this 15-year-old guy walked towards me with 2 bodyguards(probably his older brothers) who was gonna make sure the deal went smooth, the card looked ok, so I bought it just to find out later that it smelled like shit and cigarettes, wich is not nice when the GPU fans starts blowing this stinky smell around the room, and to top it off it turned out to be an GTX 760… bummer.
The performance is not as expected, maybe it´s the x4 limit or it´s just an old card.
Is there a way to check if it´s delivering what it´s supposed to? Some sort of render benchmark?
you could try cinebench R15, and check youtube videos to see how it compares
GTX 760 is not such an old card and it should have a performance in Cycles just worse than a GTX 960. For BMW27.blend scene from here:
https://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?239480-2-7x-Cycles-benchmark-(Updated-BMW)
GTX 760 should be around 02:15.00
It finished at about 2.42.00.
Computer:
AMD Athlon 5350 APU
4GB RAM
Clean install of windows 7, only Blender 2.78c filmic, teamviewer and Dropbox running
GTX 760 2GB VRAM
Approximately how long does it take for the first tile rendering image to appear when you select “Render image” or F12?
I tried again and it took 7sec for the first tile to appear and the total render took 2.37, so 2.30.00 then, guess it´s more or less what to expect.
No, it’s okay that you compute all the time. I just wanted to know if that APU might slow down the render. But no, 7 sec in BMW scene is ok.
Here you can see the time that another user obtained:
https://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?239480-2-7x-Cycles-benchmark-(Updated-BMW)&p=2973828&viewfull=1#post2973828
Anyway 02: 37.00 is not bad render time (for this machine, I guess).
Just in case you try different tile sizes (Render tab - Performance - tiles) to see if render time improves. (for example 240x180 or 480x270)