I’m getting slow render times on my Cycles renders with 2.65 (and all previous versions). I have a Core i7-2600 with 6GB of RAM, Windows 7 and a Nvidia GTX 550 Ti card. When I render using CPU or CUDA there is virtually no difference in render times, they are almost exactly identical.
This benchmark renders in 19m44s using GPU; compared to similar cards (e.g. GTX560 Ti) in the benchmark this seems pretty dismal.
For my own renders I played around with tile sizes and such as recommended in this tutorial by Andrew Price. The changes seemed to affect both the GPU and CPU render times in equal amounts. This strikes me as odd.
I’ve seen some very nice Youtube videos of rendering with the GTX550 card and Cycles, but I’m not getting the same results.
I now have some inkling what the problem might be. When I set the rendering to GPU, render a scene and check the GPU usage, the usage remains 0%! The CPU usage, however, goes to 100%, so it seems that GPU rendering isn’t working, even though Blender says it’s using the GPU, it’s not…
Anyone have an idea what the problem might be? I’ve tried changing some settings in the NVDIA control panel but that didn’t help.
With an earlier version of Blender on my Mac, I had the interesting experience of Blender claiming to be using the GPU when it obviously was not. Installing and configuring the CUDA software solved that problem for me. There’s a bit of “holding your jaw just right” in getting everything to go properly the first time . . .
Sundialsvc4 can you explain what you mean by installing and configuring the CUDA software? I have a Mac Pro, with Quadro 4000 for Mac video card. I’ve downloaded the cuda drivers, cc compiler, and Xcode tool kits. Blender allows me to render with gpu, but its twice as slow as CPU rendering. Is there another step I’m missing. I kept figuring my Quadro 4000 card had to have better gpu rendering them it does.
