I intend to build a small, five node, linux beowolf-based render farm/workstation for Blender/Cycles and Maya/Mental Ray. I will also be using likely be using NukeX in the future.
I am on a pretty limited budget so I cannot put fancy pants GPUs into all five of the nodes I currently have planned. But tentatively have inexpensive GT 730’s in each of them (each with 384 CUDA cores at about 0.20USD/core). I plan on a K4000 on the head unit.
Is it sensible to even have this card in the nodes? Will beowolf utilize them suitably? Should I just skip this and save the $400 I am spending on graphics acceleration at the node level? What is the answer to live, the universe, and everything?
However I’m not familiar with Maya/Mental Ray and how well they can utilize GeForce cards, I think that Maya was more like a Quadro/FirePro optimized software so I’m guessing that you should check out some benchmarks with both geforce and quadro GPUs and how they perform with Blender and Maya.
Hi, there are three GT 730, two with DDR3 VRam 1 and 2 GB and one with 1 GB DDR 5 VRAM.
DDR3 VRam is ugly slow for Cycles and 1 GB is not enough to render bigger scenes.
The best card for low budgets is the GTX 750Ti 2 GB (Maxwell core), you need 2 to kick the 5 GT 730 (rebranded GT 630 Kepler core from 2012). You cant compare Cuda cores from different series, 384 Maxwell cores are a way faster than Kepler.
A mainboard for two or three cards is much much cheaper than boards with 5, less cards need less power, so smaller power supply.
Blender does not profit from Quadro cards and Maya work good with gaming cards.
If I would buy a system today I would go for CPU, i7 6 core or dual Xeon.
Don’t get the discontinued Quadro K4000($1,269 at launch 2 years ago, cheaper now but still not worth it), the Maxwell Quadro K2200 outperforms it for a fraction of the price or generally is very close to the much more expensive K4000 and is much more power efficient.
I just bought and installed the new nVidia Quadro K2200 on my Linux computer (64bit). I also updated the nVidia-drivers and Blender to the latest version (Blender 2.72 and nVidia 343-22).
Everything works well, BUT Blender doesn’t show me any GPU-options in the User-settings -> System menu.
