I was looking at upgrading my computer and i was wondering if any of you have a GTX570 and how well would it work for Cycles. I heard the 680’s don’t work well. So I guess I am looking in the 500’s what would you recommend? Would I be ok with 1 card and add a 2nd one in a few months?
I’d advice to use the ancient art of SeFu-Do.
The long forgotten way of the search function, this topic has been covered dozend of times in various threads. 
I honestly did that, I did a search for GTX, GTX 570, GTX570. Nothing came up.
With all due respect to arexma, I remember a number of times the GTX-560 has been mentioned, but none come to mind for the 570. I may have missed them, but if you didn’t find any…
I have the 560 Ti and it works with cycles. I can’t say how well, because after a few initial tests, I decided to stick to the IR until cycles is further along. I can tell you, however, that the 560 Ti has been mentioned several times on this forum in regards to its cycles performance, so you’ll likely have better luck finding information about it.
And I don’t think there’s that much difference between the 560 and the 570, technologically speaking. A quick look at some reviews ‘out there’ should give you a better idea on that one.
After more searching I was able to find:
Grapes scene actual ranking:
GTX 580: 43.95 seconds
GTX 570: 58 seconds
GTX 560Ti: 68 seconds
GTX 460: 78 seconds
GTS 450: 119 seconds
GTX 295: 7min 58seconds (double GPU card but Cycles uses only 1 yet)
GT9600: 14min48sec
Anyone know if 2 cards would give me better results. I was thinking about 1 card and upgrading in a few months.
Thanks!
-Jonn
yes… MultiCard GPU rendering is supported under cycles… not sure when it was introduced but it definetly will be in 2.63
I do not know all the technicalities behind hardware and I do not have much spare/old hardware to compare, I can still tell you that I am very happy with my relatively new GTX 570 2.5GB.
At first I was aiming at the limited edition of 560’s 2GB with a higher CUDA core count but I don’t know if they had ever arrived in Poland and the price would not have been much lower anyways.
IMO if you can afford a better card from the 500 series do not hesitate since their performance scales quite well. Then you have to of’course get a card with double the amount of VRAM compared to the standard version.