I’ve read a lot about the nVidia OpenGL crippling support etc, but as I’m on the verge of completely upgrading my system i’m a bit miffed as to what to do!
Basically what I’d want to work properly is to play Skyrim at Ultra settings with Mods, but thats a side issue. I’ve heard that the 295 cards are faster than newer nVidia cards. So would my setup be:
295 GTX card for viewport
Newer nvidia card for CUDA GPU rendering?
Or if I just spent the money getting 2 newer nvidia cards using SLI, would that bridge the gap and make my games etc better?
I guess my question is, what is a good setup for using Blender atm taking into account this crippling issue?
I’ve heard that the 295 cards are faster than newer nVidia cards.
If you disable “double-sided” lighting for every object on a newer NVIDIA gpu, viewport performance will be fine. Picking might be slower however, I have yet to hear anyone investigate this properly. Picking is slow in blender atm anyway, Psy-Fi is working on that, I guess. In general, bad viewport performance has a lot to do with all the deprecated OpenGL blender still uses, work needs to be done here, too.
Having said that, if you want to use GPU rendering it’s not a bad idea to have a secondary GPU just for display. If you want to play, maybe you should research if it’s possible to force game to use either card. By default, it will use the card the (primary) monitor is attached to.