A couple of Cycles renders. One from a BlenderGuru tute (Suzanne) and one from a BlenderCookie tute (Architectural Interior). Neither very detailed or sophisticated but I’m quite impressed. A bit dark under Suzanne’s eyelid, not sure how best to fix that.
I don’t seem to have the option of GPU rendering. My card is GTX280 and my sysem is Dell XPS730X with Core i7 processor. Should I be looking at a newer card, and if so what would work with my system? I’m not very hardware savvy.
The GTX280 will run Cycles but not the newer functions, layers, shadow, AO a.s.o, those only work on the CPU on cards <GTX460…
The option for GPU rendering is split in two. First you have to set it under File->Preferences->System->Compute device, set that to your card & CUDA. Then you choose GPU compute under the rendering options. 
Thanks for that. I tried the Suzanne image above at 100 samples both ways. GPU took 43 secs, CPU took 87 secs. Nice. I might look into upgrading though for the newer features.
do oyu know if all of the cycles functions will run on a GTX 550 Ti?
What? Of course, it will run well on a GTX550… Not the fastest card but with CC 2.0 you can render with layers, shadows, AO, everything - and it’ll guaranteed be faster than any CPU. 
whew, i just bought a graphics card and just wanted to make sure that cycles would work with it completely. got 40 bucks off to bring it down to $140 
