new graphics card and external renderer?

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1

So contemplating buying a new graphics card cause apparently my old one doesn’t work well with windows 7. Interested in getting octane for rendering. My main form of work is live action but I want to use a lot of visual effects so looking for photoreal animated objects to render and composit into my live action. I use adobe applications a lot so this is a factor in getting my grapihics card.

Couple of questions:

I saw mentioned lux render now uses GPU. Am I right and is it as speedy as octane? therefore do I need to buy ndivia card if I can use lux in the same way i could get results from ocatne?

Anyone any suggestions on a good grapics card for me?

specs here:

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2

Hi, luxrender use only a small part of the render process in gpu and is very slow compare to a real gpu renderer.
The only problem atm. is the bad viewport performance with the new 400 and 500 gtx nvidia cards and blender.
You have to wait for cycles and amd/ati for a few months or buy nvidia for cuda.
The only possibility is to buy a small quadro or older gtx 200, gt 8/9000 for monitor and a big gtx 500 for rendering.

Cheers, mib.

3

Heya

Thanks for getting back to me.

Would this do the trick with octane? http://www.nvidia.com/object/product_geforce_gtx_285_us.html

also while looking into this coming across ’ nvidia for cuda’ a lot. Whats cuda? Also can you direct blender to render from a different graphis card?

Regards

4

would it be a bad move buying a gtx285 or should I wait and try get a 5 series once 2.61 comes out?

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I can live very good with my gtx 260 and after a quick search for gtx 285 i found out it is not very cheap, about 200 €.
You can get gtx 275 for 80 € on ebay but not new. It is only usefull to buy an old card if you have a mainboard with two or more pcie slots.
If not go for a gtx 500. Don´t forget all mesh data an texture data have to fit in the gpu vram, so think about 2 GB or 3 GB VRam cards.
The VRam is not adding up, with two 1 GB cards you have only 1 GB VRam but double speed.
If i buy a new card now i would go for a gtx 560 Ti 2 GB (Ti = more cores). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_500_Series
If i have enough money > gtx 580 3 GB for shure, better two of them. :slight_smile:
Cheers, mib.

6

Thanks for getting back to me. Appreciated. You were mentioning bad viewport problems with the 500 series. In what sense?

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Some report bad performance on sculpting or highpoly meshes in viewport because nvidia slow down gtx 4/500 with the driver to push there quadro cards. There was a long thread about this but i could not find it anymore.

Cheers, mib.

8

would that affect zbrush - sculpting end of things? I want to use different tools in my arsenal so concentrating on zbrush for sculpting etc. Blender for everyting else…of course

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ZBrush doesn’t rely on your graphics card for sculpting

10

Cheers folks

as always richard you the man when it comes to zbrush