Well, with masks and skin coming with 2.64 it seems that time has come to take sculpting seriously (personally for me).
My current PC rig includes AMD 64 X2 2.5Ghz with 4Gb DDR2 RAM and GF 8800 GT 512Mb VRAM.
What video card would you recommend to be able to sculpt ~5 million polygon meshes (and bake maps off them) ? I need something significantly better than what I have, but not at $400 price tag 
Oh, and Nvidia since AMD has their drivers all screwed up on Linux. Thanks.
Not sure about what card is best for sculpting, but my advice is definitely to look for a used card on eBay or Craigslist. Got a GTX 480 for $125 pretty recently, about half price.
For what it’s worth, I use a Radeon HD 6950 under Linux with the Gallium drivers (i.e. the open source radeon driver rather than the AMD proprietary driver.) It works just fine for Blender, and can easily handle >5 million polygon meshes if VBO is enabled.
Of course, CPU and RAM play a role as well.
blender never be serious for sculpting or anything
use zbrush or other serious software for sculpt
for modeling use modo
for rendering use vray
you must be serious and professional
Well, +1 to that 
Since I am doing game dev, in-game performance is essential and so far open source drivers don’t really like our engine. AMD haven’t released their drivers for the current Linux kernel yet, so that’s kinda pain. Otherwise I’d get Radeon.
Doesn’t Blender have an issue with selection on Radeon?
Ha-ha!
Skin modifier + sculpt mode + Bsurfaces… should be largely enough for many pro applications.
I didn’t have a need in character sculpting (and any sculpting for that matter). Now I happened to need sculpting for HD models and Blender happened to get masks and skin, so now I simply have to upgrade 
But to reply to your “smart” comments, yeah, ZBrush/Mudbox is what I would use if I had $$$$ plus MoI 3D for NURBS.
To get back on topic, sorry motorsep:
Because I don’t have the patience for the classified or Ebay, also for the lifetime warranty, I just ordered a PNY nVidia GTX 560ti-OC for 199$. It is a very competent card. My next computer will be SLI capable so I can add another 560ti (or whatever is the best performance/$$$ ratio then) and be set for a little while.
Forgot to say that you must make sure that your power supply is up to the task. In your (and my) price range 500W is enough if the quality is there, while 900W of bad hardware can fail.
Hi, for me RAM limited my sculpt performance not the GFX card.
I have a GTX 550Ti 2 GB DDR5, but above 4 million polys my system starts swapping.
I had the same problem with my old 8600GT 512 MB.
Another problem is 2.63 needs much more memory as 2.62, the developers are aware of it.
This you can do with a 8600GT and enough RAM :
Cheers, mib.
Ouch… So maybe it make sense to boost my RAM to 8Gb and see of I can get better performance on my 8800 GT before I fork over money for a new GPU (and probably a new PSU since I don’t think I have 500W PSU).
That video with 45M poly is almost unreal. From reading comments it seems that CPU and RAM are the key components, not the GPU. Gotta hear it from the creator though
@nicholasbishop: So what’s more important for Sculpt and multires - GPU or CPU + RAM ? If that guy could easily work with 45M polys on GF 8600, that means I can save a pile of cash on GPU upgrade and instead buy new CPU and add more RAM.
Are official builds for Win/Linux OpenMP-enabled ?
There’s no single element that’s more important, you want to balance everything.
Regarding RAM, I just did a quick test to give you some concrete numbers. Starting from the default cube, I applied subsurf at level 3 to give a base mesh of 384 faces. (Not declaring this to be optimal or anything, just a test.) Then I added multires and switched into sculpt mode (sculpt mode draws differently than object mode, so subdividing can be faster in sculpt mode purely by virtue of not uploading as much VBO data to the graphics card.)
Subdividing up to multires level 7 (about 6.2 million faces) uses 1085 MB of memory (according to the info in the header.) After subdividing again (25.1 million faces), mem usage is 4193 MB. Sculpting is still usably smooth at this resolution. Note that this is RAM usage; the graphics memory used should be much lower.
So, taking 25 million polys as an example, this would probably be totally unusable with only 4GB of RAM. It would have gone into swap space during subdivision, and as soon as you’re in swap you’re dead. (Swap on an SSD helps some, but still probably quite slow.) On the other hand, 4GB of RAM at the 6 million poly level is probably plenty, and adding more RAM wouldn’t make 6 million-poly sculpting go any faster.
It’s also quite possible to run out of graphics memory, and this could cause all kinds of nastiness. Depending on your graphics drivers it might crash, revert to a slow path, or start swapping data between system RAM and the card. The “fancy” features of the graphics card (vertex/fragment/geometry shaders for example) won’t matter much for sculpting, since all the actual sculpt calculation stuff is done by the CPU.
As far as the choice of CPU, I don’t have a lot of solid data on what’s important. Faster is generally better, but if your real bottleneck is e.g. sending data to the graphics card, a faster processor won’t help any.
My guess is that you’d do well to upgrade to at least 6 or 8GB of RAM (quite cheap these days), but I’m not familiar enough with your processor and graphics card to offer recommendations on those.
Moved from “General Forums > Blender and CG Discussions” to “Support > Technical Support”
@motorsep, you repeatedly post your support requests in the general forums. Please stop. Use the support forums for support posts.
Sorry Fweeb, I will try my best not to do that. May I ask why do we have General section? (which is where I get almost instant response due to the highest number of people visiting)
I performed a test.
I subdivided default Cube using Multires. Did that several times, applied Multires and so on, until I reached 6.3M polys. Navigation in Object mode was sluggish. However navigation in Sculpt mode with Fast Navigate on was fast. Sculpting was fast enough. I haven’t tried using textures or anything crazy, just default Draw brush and Clay brush. I noticed that zooming out and doing brush strokes over the surface or simply making strokes with brush of larger radius was sluggish. Blender showed 1.8Gb RAM being used.
Next step was to go for 25M polys. So I did. Blender was swapping like crazy. However, navigation was ok (not as fast as with 6.3M polys, but ok) and sculpting was tolerable. I would think that at such high polycount I would probably use stamps (textures/decals) and some fine brush strokes. I was unable to test it because Blender swapped and froze temporarily every time I would navigate Brush menu and select a brush.
Fun part came when I decided to apply Multires and export 25M mesh. To make story short I just say that Blender crashed after 1 hr of chewing on the 25M poly mesh.
So I assume my GPU has nothing to do with it and I am bound by RAM and CPU.
Question - why Sculpt (or I suppose anything in Blender; don’t know about other apps) depends on the mesh’s scale so much? Larger meshes almost impossible to sculpt because even at Strength set to maximum I get weak deformations. Same goes for smaller than default Cube meshes - Strength needs to be set to very low values otherwise mesh get enormous deformations.
P.S. With something like Dynamesh in Zbrush (especially with ability to redistribute polygons to create mesh of even density) or at least Sculptris (adaptive tessellation) Blender will become ultimate sculpting weapon of mine :evilgrin:
When sculpting huge terrains, having whole terrain mesh subdivided makes no sense, that’s where adaptive tessellation comes to play.
P.P.S. Awesome job you’ve done with Sculpt Nicholas!!! Thanks a bunch!
hahaha LOLLLLL
Have you actually tried making posts in the Support forums? It’s a very active part of the site.
The General Forums are as described in their titles: news and discussion. That is where you find out about and talk about things related to Blender and computer graphics. If your question involves the words “how” or “why” or “where” or you’re asking for advice of some sort…the post belongs in the Support forums.
Gotcha Fweeb!
@nicholasbishop: So any thoughts on why Blender crashes when applying Multiures modifier to the sculpted mesh of 25M polygons? Maybe memory leaks? Or do I need more than 4Gb of RAM to be able to apply multires of that quality and export the mesh?
P.S. I will have 8Gb of RAM soon. We shall see if that helps
It’s quite possible the extra 8GB of memory will help; actions like applying tend to spike the memory usage.
If the extra memory doesn’t help, it’s likely your graphics card that is running out of memory (object mode drawing of multires with VBO is less efficient than drawing in sculpt mode.)