Cycles and NVIDIA 8800 GT / MacPro with NVIDIA GT 560 for GPU rendering only

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1

Hi all

NVIDIA offers CUDA for the 8800 GT and on mikes benchmark scene I found some GT 8800 entries with CUDA times.
So at one point it did work. Does it still work with Cycles?

I am OS X and got the offer to get a Mac Pro 8 core extremely cheap but it only has a GT 8800 in it.

I was also curious if maybe a 560 could be put into a secondary PICe slot simply to be used only for GPU with Cycles while the 8800 GT runs the display.

If all fails I would also be ok to do the rendering on Win and I hope that at least there the 560 will work fine or will there be any boot issues as well??

Any input?

2

Does it still work with Cycles?
No it won’t, it only has shader model 1.1 while cycles 1.3

3

thank you.

4

And even with 1.3 you’ll have a ton of problems due to parts of Cycles not being fully supported (you really should get shader model 2.x). However, using it as viewport GPU and the GTX-560 is a Very Good Idea :slight_smile:

Most people don’t realize how much of their VRAM is eaten by the OS. You might get several hundred MB more available for rendering if you do this (not sure about OSX but Windows 7 gladly eats over 300MB VRAM when idle).