I’m recently back to Blender after years away due to hardware constraints. So I have a new system that is working quite well for me so far. No 2 day renders yet! So, I apologize for the newbness of my questions as I get back up to speed.
These are my specs:
3.4 GHz i5
GeForce GTX 780m 4 GB
So in my testing today, I’ve noticed that Im getting no benefit from GPU rendering. In my latest test the CPU took 51 seconds and my GPU took 1:15 seconds. Both renders were at 100 samples. Im just curious if this is normal considering my specs and if so, is there anything I can do to actually benefit from my GPU?
Either way, I’m just happy to have the hardware to actually use cycles!
The mobile versions of the NVIDIA GPUs (AMDs most probably too) are generally slower than the desktop variants. There should be an acceleration, though. The tile size seems to influence the speed heavily, refer to
http://www.blenderguru.com/4-easy-ways-to-speed-up-cycles/
blender guru writes an article on how to speed up cycles rendering.
the only thing that really changed anything for me was the tile size which you might want to play around with.
Where the GPU seems to beat the CPU is in the larger scenes with lots of objects, so you might want to trial that, otherwise it could also be graphics card drivers which you might need to update.
Also to double check which device is faster switch the viewport from solid/textured to rendered. making sure you have 100 samples in the preview window, you should notice that the GPU calculates the samples a lot faster then the CPU.
Hope this helps