GPU Upgrade

Support Lighting and Rendering
1

Hello,

I’ve posted this in rendering as it relates to a GPU upgrade and Cycles.

I’m currently running 2x ATI 5850s but am looking at the GTX670. Has anyone used this card with Cycles, and would this be a worthwhile upgrade?

Many thanks for your time,

Andy

2

Hi, I tried to upgrade mine last month (unfortunately I have no budget :o) and this is all that I could get in forums and support pages. Not a straight answer but it might help.

  1. Currently, Blender is taking more advantage from CUDA but it will probably have support for other technologies like ATI OpenCL.

  2. Geforce works fine with blender (I suggest you get the chip in a decent brand of graphic cards).

  3. Any CUDA capable processor will have advantage in GPU render with Cycles as long as it has at least 96 cores (a GT440 for example) - but that won’t be a problem since the GTX670 has 1344 cores :wink:

I currently have a GT610 (48 cores) and it’s as fast as the CPU (Athlon II x3).

IMPORTANT: You might already be aware but you will need a good PSU and a good MB for it to work without crashes. I have some Windows crashes caused by the communication between the MB / CPU / GPU and there are lots of other people that have the same issue namely with ASUS M4N68 motherboard. Anyway, if you have a more recent MB and CPU that won’t be a problem and this particular issue can be controlled by reducing the tile size in the integrator settings.

Good luck,
LM

3

GTX 660 TI is the better investment if you’re looking at the 600 series ( for gaming mostly ). if you want to do some serious rendering get the 580 3GB and keep a separate card just for viewport display.

4

Boy thats gonna cost a fortune :slight_smile: …i recently added a GTX560Ti to my system… works really well with cycles…sped up my render time hell of a lot… :slight_smile: so if u have the money…it wud be worthwhile spending it on the GPU :slight_smile:

5

6xx serie have some issues, first it new, and drivers need time to get CUDA/OpenCL speed, and more important for some reason NVidia crippled computation performance to game pipeline, maybe to get more $ from TESLA. Many ppls was discouraged when see how poor 680 render Cycles compared to 480/580.

6

I just got a few cards and here are my results.

My previous cycles render was about 10 minutes since the GPU was not supported.
Card #1: Geforce 560ti rendered in 57 seconds.
Cards#2: Geforce 680 rendered in 52 seconds.

Not as much of a bump as I thought, and that makes the 560ti ($150) the best bet for me. That is the card I bought for my home system, and the 680’s were bought at work. The fact that the $150 card competes with the $500 card says a lot. The only thing I would say is make sure you get at least 2gig cards, or you may find yourself not able to use cuda on complex scenes.

7

I should mention that the render times I posted above are also for the benchmark scene of Mike Pan’s BMW.

And yea, the 4 gig cards are worth it. I hit the wall on ram usage on my 560ti when I was using some large scenes.