I’m building a new computer. I’ve chosen to buy a gtx 780 3GB.
Will I be able to keep on working on Blender during a GPU Cycles rendering or is it necessary to add an other card (a 750Ti for instance) so that the display won’t freeze ?
I do have an old radeon HD 4870 (5 years old), could it be used for this purpose ?
I will be using two monitors (1 is full HD, 1 is 1360x768 pixels), CPU will be i7 4770K (btw mothercards do include a GPU now, maybe it’s a solution but I suspect these GPU are too weak or am I wrong ?)
If you can, use two cards. Having two GPUs will allow you to use all the power and memory of the 780 just to render and the other to take care of refreshing the screens. I had issues at one time mixing ATI and Nvidia, but I believe there are other folks out there living happily with mixed systems.
The GPU on the motherboard might work just fine if you’re only using it for dealing with the displays. Give it a shot.
Hi, the new HD 3-5000 integrated GPU are very good for Blender.
I made some tests with my i5 3570K GPU HD 4000 and there was no difference to my GTX 550Ti and Blender.
I run two GCs: one low end hd7750 feeding my monitors and a gtx560 only for rendering. It works quite well under Win7. Keep in mind that the monitor won’t lag with two cards but blender will. If you are f12 rendering the scene will be partially locked and you would have to open another instance of blender to be able to work on that scene. With preview rendering the blender will lag the same as with single gpu (for example the node editor). Other programs will work just fine.
I have doubts about the performance of the integrated cards and all benchmarks speak against (cinebench) but I haven’t tested it too much. Maybe in solid mode the performance would not be so different, but what about Textured?
Ok, thanks. So apparently, no hurry to get a second GPU, first I will test the new building. I guess I’m not used to the power of a recent CPUs and GPUs.My actual computer gets stuck so quickly (and no gpu rendering because of ATI, but soon the frustration will end !
