Hello. I’m busy with making a short animation movie. Now I have a Asus gtx 560 SE and the render times per frame are 1:16, And its only 10 samples!!! The scene has 340.000 verts, 244.000 faces. Before it starts to render a new frame it takes ~~11 sec to build. It’s a nightmare… But I hope to buy soon the msi gtx 970 4g(b?) gaming. What render times can I expect then? I downloaded the bmw scene of mike pan, and i compared my times with times of the gtx 970. The gtx 970 times were ~~27-32 sec, and my times were ~~70-100 sec. (the difference is because of different tile size) Every time I saw that the 970 was ~~2.3 times faster. Can i expect that my scene will render also 2.3 times faster when i buy the 970? Another question: Do you have good tips on how to make the render times faster? (I know the ‘andrew price’-tips already…)
I can have a go at answering all your questions (I have 2 970’s) but to answer any of them we would need:
At the very least some screen shots, and preferably a copy of a .blend file.
Hi, try my benchmark: http://www.blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?350975-The-new-Cycles-GPU-2-72-Benchmark
On page 6 is a list with several GTX 970.
Building time does not change with different GPU.
Cheers, mip
Here is the blend file. If the textures are missing or something is wrong please report. If you can find things that can speed up the render please say it. The scene is far from done. Also my render time does varies a lot, why?
this is the link to the blend: https://www.dropbox.com/s/if4wcci2657hroq/ba970render.rar?dl=0
I found that with 1 GTX 970, I get render times of 24 seconds per frame (including compositor processing, otherwise 16 seconds)
Using 2 970’s is only giving me a total render time of 21 seconds, however, the synchronization time is approx 8 seconds, and the post processing seems to take 8 seconds, meaning using 1 970 ‘rendering’ took 8 seconds, while with 2 it took 5 seconds.
Also note each time renders really fast, so the GPU is rarely able to get to 100% utilization.
According to my 970’s, your looking at ~3-4x the render speed on your scene (the render times didn’t really have any variation in them)
Hi,
I tried your scene just for fun.
I got 1 frame rendered in 30sec on my GTX 750Ti (8sec building, compositing from 23 to 30, meaning 14-15secs of pure GPU rendering).
I got 1 frame rendered in 50sec on my i5-4670 (32x32 tiles, 8 sec building, compositing from 43 to 50, meaning 35secs of pure rendering).
Maybe you can try CPU rendering (my i5 got 4 cores and no hyper threading, any i7 would improve rendering time by 25-40%).
I think that getting a new CG only for this scene would be a waste. It should be an investment if you plan to do more like this in the future.
Thanks for downloading the blend. 24 sec is really fast 
btw: do you have the msi gtx 970 gaming? or another 970? I have a i7 3770k (3.50 ghz). This little thing is even faster than my gtx 560 :O. I have a render time (with build and comp.) of 42 seconds. Thats almost 2 times faster than my gpu. Now I will work on my cpu, but im still going to buy a 970 i think. Than i will use gpu again. But the times of building and comp. is a bit much… especially the comp. time, is there a way to speed up the compositing? Can you look at it? Improve, and look if something could be faster?
I know the 970’s are new, but honestly they aren’t as good as a 780 ti. Maybe that will change with up-coming versions of Blender and driver updates. I still think the 780 ti is the way to go, and the price of them is coming down now. I know it’s only 3 GB compared to the 4GB of a 970 but if out and out speed is what you want got 780. Just for the record I rendered your scene in 18.11 secs including building and compositing.
Compositing is mainly CPU dependent, I’m not sure there is a way to speed up this part, however I know little about compositor tweeking.
About 780ti, it is still twice the price of a 970. Better be sure it is what you need before buying…
I enabled OpenCL for compositing, and get around 21 seconds now.
My 970’s are reference coolers (blow air out the back) so they aren’t as quiet, but they still OC to ~1.4GHz core. I got reference as I’ll be water cooling them in a month as summer comes