Hello,
I am debating between the EVGA GTX 580 and the Gigabyte GTX 760 for my build. I understand the 580 has remarkable render times in Blender, but on top of being able to render well in Blender, I need a card that can handle the Adobe suite and light gaming at times. Which one of these two cards would be best for what I need?
Hi, if you get a good prize for the GTX 580 3 GB buy it, it still a very fast card for Cycles but loud and hot and power hungry.
If you can wait for the GTX 860 with Maxwell core do it, the first Maxwell card (GTX 750) is faster than my GTX 760. 
Look here: http://www.blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?327909-Cycles-NVidia-MAXWELL-Benchmarks
Cheers, mib.
Isn’t it true that the 580 will only be using 1.5 of the 3GB ? Apart from speed consider the importance of memory. If I recall 580 is two 560 GPU which are both used but only the memory of one circuit.
You can get the Gigabyte 760 with 4GB.
Also note that among the NVIDIA 760’s the Gigabyte is slightly overclocked from the factory.
That said I am not sure what would be best… just my thoughts.
I ended up with a Gigabyte760 which carried the right price tag for me.
Nope. The GTX x90 models from nVidia are the dual GPU ones (590 / 690 / 790). The GTX 580 will use the full 3 GB of its memory (there is a GTX 580 variant with 1.5 GB, too, though, maybe that caused the confusion).
Still I’m not sure if I would recommend buying the GTX 580 anymore. Is it fast? Hell, yeah! But it is also two generations (shortly: three generations) old and it is only a matter of time until newer versions of CUDA will not fully support it any more (imho).
Thanks for telling me about the 580. Based on what you said I’m probably gonna go with a gigabyte 750 or a gigabyte 770. Can you recommend one?
I’m with the same question in this case a gtx 770 4gb / gtx 780ti 3gb.
Actually the 750 TI should be the card to get. I would avoid the 4GB 6XX and 7XX cards. You cannot use more than 2GB on them for Cycles anyway (whether that is a nvidia driver restriction or Cycles limit I still dont know), they are way more expensive, hotter and render at about the same speed. This rarely gets mentioned but I have 2 670 4GB that will refuse to render anything if I exceed 2GB. Maybe this should be posted as a warning…
Never heard of that one. I have no poblems rendering scenes > 2 GB on my GTX 680?
But equally if you overshoot the scene also Example 5 gb of gpu 3gb I could do the same render?
Sorry, I don’t get you…? The scene has to fit into the VRAM. If geometry/textures etc. need more RAM than is installed on your card, the scene will not render at all (on the GPU - you can still render on the CPU, of course).
@ Ikari Shinji:
Good to know. Still happened to me since I bought them in August. Maybe it is because I have two cards ?
@anaho
I just browsed through your posts to find more information about the details of this memory limitation.
Do I understand correctly that the problem is geometry data exceeding 2 GB? So, if I had 1.8 GB of geometry and another 1.5 GB of texture data that would render fine, but 2.1 GB geometry wouldn’t?
I might have to check back on that. I remember several scenes with a memory consumption > 3 GB rendering fine, but I could not say how much of that was geo data…
I just removed the SLI-bridge. Nada. 2048MB cap. Then removed the second card. Nope. Still not rendering after 2048MB. In fact most of the memory was spent on geometry to overcome the fact that Blenders displacement “capabilities” are a cruel joke. I didnt know that Cycles made a difference between geometric data and image textures. Is the ratio a 50/50 split? Is this seperation also present in CPU mode ? Meaning 8GB max geomteric data if I have 16GB. It is interesting and I have not heard of it before…
You were right. I loaded a 32k texture in, the consumption went up to 5,8 GB ( which you have to divide by the number of cards you have so 2,9 GB here ) and it rendered flawless. Good thinking there man. I wonder how many people are aware of that seperation. I definitely wasn´t. Made my day pretty much 
I still wonder whether this is a Cycles memory management thing: A hard-coded 50/50 geo/texture GPU memory split doesn’t make much sense imho and I never heard of anything like that e. g. in Octane Render…
And yes, this makes displacement even harder to work with: Any above average amount of subdivision (for fine details) will reach that geo limit pretty soon…
It seems to be the case however. I still wonder where you learned about that? I pretty much lurk these technical forums and never heard of that …
Well, I just made an educated guess…
From reading your posts about the matter I got the impression that you came to the very same conclusion: Cycles hitting a ceiling with complex geometry using more than 2 GB of memory (which I could verify with some testing on my GTX 680 after reading your posts). But since I knew that I myself had already rendered scenes using more than 3 GB memory flawlessly plus the fact that you rarely read about this issue around here, I came to the conclusion that geo + texture could very well exceed the 2 GB barrier, but not geometry alone.
Hi fishtin, the GTX 750Ti is as fast as the GTX 760 but you get only 2 GB cards atm…
I would wait for 750 4 GB cards or the new GTX 800 cards.
I am satisfied with my EVGA GTX 760 4 GB, fast, silent and cool.
If you are working mostly with low poly/ small scenes you are fine with the GTX 750Ti 2 GB.
Cheers, mib.
I am on the verge of shopping for a new card myself and I wondered why anyone would choose the 750 over the 660? Doesn’t the 660 have more GPU cores, and thus is faster?
I would see a GPU + CPU / (780 nvidia / nvidia 770) + (an i7 or fx)
To view at least as it can move.
now include nvidia gtx 780 will get a 6gb.