What is the best graphic card today for blender?

Hi, can someone help me with this issue?
what is the best graphic card today? (2014)

Best graphic card for Blender? It’s likely to be AMD/Nvidia card but which one is the best in viewport performance, OpenCL acceleration in compositing, or GPU rendering with Cycles render, no one knows. OpenCL acceleration is crippled in Nvidia cards (compared to AMD) but Cycles uses CUDA for rendering.

Best card for Cycles GPU rendering in existence is likely Nvidia Titan Z. If I understood correctly, it can actually use whole 12GB of memory which would make it the most everything option for that purpose.

I still have a lot to learn about Blender but my goal is to be able to render in the shortest time, both… complex images, and animations!
Thanks for your help!

I am, like u, looking for a(n affordable, )good graphic card. After some researches i found the GTX580 as a fast and (if u find one) maybe not to expensive option.
but if someone can recommend me a newer one around 200€ (not more than 225€) pls. reply ! :slight_smile:

I can also vouch for the 750ti. It isn’t the fastest, but it is the best value. with the amount of money you save, you could buy another one and double your throughput. $300 for 2 750ti vs ~$1000 for a titan. I really enjoy mine.

hmm…thats a very cheap one…if i buy me one it should really boost my render times (it will anyway because i can only render with CPU so far but…) i looked it up on amazon: ~145€ i would even buy one for 200€ but it should really be a good one which supports CUDA2 (i think it´s a must since the latest Blender versions)

@Zimtstern: Don’t know what you exactly mean about CUDA2, but both GTX750 and GTX750ti belongs to the new Maxwell generation and support CUDA shader 5.

I just read that Powered by first-generation NVIDIA® Maxwell™ architecture versus Powered by new NVIDIA® Maxwell™ architecture
Im not sure what that is all about…

I might get a GTX970 since I hace only an ati card so no cuda cores for me…

There is also this option for a nVidia TESLA c2070 which costs retail about 2600

Which one is better for blender? I hace no clue. The thing is I can get both at the same price so that is no issue

AMD/ATI cards do better in Blender’s viewport than Nvidia cards do. For Cycles, you have to go with Nvidia as AMD’s drivers at this time don’t work very well with it. If your motherboard and power supply can support it, keep your ATI card for the viewport, and add a Nvidia card just to render with Cycles. Having two cards is the best setup so you can still do stuff with your system as the render runs in parallel on the Nvidia card. Otherwise your system will be laggy and it will also slow down your render if you try to do multiple things at the same time on just one card.

AFAIK that’s not true anymore since “Double Sided” has been disabled by default for mesh objects (since 2.70). Just saying…

Excellent. :slight_smile:

Just wanted to share that I have made the step after hours of staring at my basket. Im receiving the GTX 970 if I can do anything to provide info for the curious say so.

How is the GTX970 working out? I’m in the market for a GPU upgrade.

something to keep in mind when shopping for cards. The whole scene has to fit in the memory of the GPU to use rendering, plus you need to load the kernels into GPU memory, which are also giant.

E.g. I have 1.25GB on my old GTX 480… and I can’t even use the experimental feature set in Cycles because there is not enough VRAM to load the kernels in the first place, apparently.

How about today?

Currently the 980 TI/Titan Z, though with the focus on AMD cards, that could change in the very near future.

Does 980 Ti/Titan work for rendering?

I read this article http://gadgets.ndtv.com/laptops/reviews/nvidia-geforce-gtx-980-ti-and-geforce-gtx-titan-x-review-4k-gaming-and-beyond-1-715609

It says “In an interesting turn of events, Nvidia no longer makes its Titan series cards suitable for accelerated parallel computing and intense number-crunching. Previous models supported double-precision floating-point operations, effectively making them low-priced Quadro cards for workstations, but the new Titan X is purely for gaming.”

Does this help rendering or the older versions are better?

They are talking about scientific number crunching here I believe. Mostly renderers are single-precision FP and really fast with the 980ti and Titan X.

sure someone will correct me if I’m wrong …think the 900 series work out a lot cheaper then the titan for the speed
but titans tend to have more ram …pretty much puts the ball back in your court :wink:

I have both a GTX 980ti and 2 980.
Did a longer investigation before getting the ti instead of a titan x, here’s why:

  • Very complex scenes you could not even render on 12GB like for example gooseberry ( needs 13GB+ )
  • Cause not all features are supported ( or performing fast ) on gpu rendering in cycles it may be not worth to get the biggest gpu ( hair is way faster on cpu !!! )
  • the titan with its x-tra 6GB is around 300 bucks more expensive while only a tad faster
  • from the former conclude it’s still nice to have a fairly fast cpu + enough RAM, so spend money there also

Another consideration i made:

  • The ti with 6 GB drives the screens and thus has still 5.4GB available for rendering, while the 2 gtx 980 can use each the full 4GB ( only for render ).

Combining lower end gpu’s can also be a choice depending on your needs and pci slots available.
Keep an eye on balancing your system, lowend cpu/chipset/RAM and fast gpu is not wise ( gpu feeding )

To give a rough idea on thermal behaviour and used VRAM ( desktop only ):

| NVIDIA-SMI 346.96 Driver Version: 346.96 |
|-------------------------------±---------------------±---------------------+
| GPU Name Persistence-M| Bus-Id Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan Temp Perf Pwr:Usage/Cap| Memory-Usage | GPU-Util Compute M. |
|===============================+======================+======================|
| 0 GeForce GTX 980 Off | 0000:02:00.0 N/A | N/A |
| 26% 30C P8 N/A / N/A | 15MiB / 4095MiB | N/A Default |
±------------------------------±---------------------±---------------------+
| 1 GeForce GTX 980 Off | 0000:03:00.0 N/A | N/A |
| 26% 26C P8 N/A / N/A | 15MiB / 4095MiB | N/A Default |
±------------------------------±---------------------±---------------------+
| 2 GeForce GTX 980 Ti Off | 0000:04:00.0 N/A | N/A |
| 22% 37C P8 N/A / N/A | 409MiB / 6143MiB | N/A Default |
±------------------------------±---------------------±---------------------+

Jens