Hey everybody I’m new to Blender!
You have Fweeb and his blender for dummies book to blame for me. Anyway I was just doing a blender guru tutorial on cycles and tried to change to the GPU as the renderer. I have an older graphics card (GeForce 210) with a compute capability of 1.2 so it wouldn’t work. I did some research and found that if I changed cycles to experimental it would work. No go. Now I am wondering why it isn’t working and if it is even worth the bother to find out. I am currently using the CPU to render which is a Intel Core 2 Duo 2.5ghz.
Thanks for your help!
Sounds similar to my experience. I started using blender with my old laptop, dual core 2.0GHz Gforce 105M. GPU and CPU rendering were both too slow to really enjoy blender. I can understand the feeling of really slow rendering.
My solution is to buy assemble a new desktop, here is my list: intel i7, Gforce 660 2Gb, 16 G DDR3 …
It’s not working because computer 1.2 simply doesn’t support all of the features of Cycles on the GPU, the cards that are that old don’t offer an appreciable speed gain over the CPU, and Cycles only has one main developer who can’t spend time keeping everything in Cycles working for ancient (in computer terms) hardware. If you compile Blender yourself and disable certain features you may be able to get it working, but I definitely don’t think it’s worth the time with a 210 or a 105m.
Too bad 
Guess I’ll stick to viewing in solid and CPU rendering. I’m wondering though, would a purchase of a new graphics card be of use? Or is the CPU too old and would bottleneck it. And how much would a decent card cost that wouldn’t be outdated in a couple years (if that’s even possible).
It won’t work at all, we removed the entire support for cards with compute capability < 2.0 in current master.
I heard that Nvidia graphics cards are better for cycles. Is that true? Would one of those be a better purchase than, say a Radeon card. I was also wondering whether there was any point in keeping my card if/when I get a new one? Can the total power of two cards be added together? Or am I just wishfully thinking.
Guess I should look around the forum before asking my own questions!
nVidia cards aren’t just better for Cycles, they’re the ONLY supported cards for Cycles.
Support is even more important than better! 
I would like to get a better card as my rendertimes are SUPER slow, but would the slow CPU bottleneck the card? I don’t really have enough for a whole new computer, if I could just upgrade the card for about 100 bucks that would be great. Any suggestions?