i searched up on the topic, and it came up with some worrying info
personally, i have the budget to go for GTX 980 (X2) or GTX 970 (X3, perferred)
but some people say that you can only access the first card’s memory when rendering, which is worrying, because GTX 970 only has 3 GB of VRAM, and i don’t want it to crash…
and if it doesn’t only use 3 GB out of 12GB of VRAM, how does the performance scale in 3 cards?
i thought it would just go 1/3 the time because the separate cards can just render different light source, and then combined them after, but some say it doesn’t, and they inter communicate when rendering…
please gimme answers (T^T) thx
thisis the system with triple 970
and thisis the double 980
no, the problem(actually, more like happy)
i found official retails that are super cheap, so i would like to buy 3 780, but
PLEASE answer this T^T, they are going to run out of stock soon
should i go 970 X3? 980X2? 780X3? 780ti X2?
please answer… T^T all of them are running out of stock
780’s all the way. If you can afford it go for the ti versions. Don’t know what the future holds for the 980, with driver updates and improvements in Blender/Cycles they may come good, but at the moment they can’t touch the 780’s.
The only benefit I know of to running the ATI up front is it frees the CUDA cards of any memory responsibility as far as you desktop is concerned. I have considered that direction myself but have no first hand knowledge if it works well. If it is in your budget I would think that trip 780’s would be the better option for all out render performance. However, if vram is a concern then the ATI primary should save a few hundred meg depending on desktop size.
The whole scene has to fit in the memory of each card, so memory is not added.
If you have two 4 GB cards you can use 4 GB.
If you have one 2 GB and one 4 GB card you can use only 2 GB.
I have a 1.28 GB card and a 4 GB card.
For small scenes I use both cards, for bigger scenes I use only the 4 GB card.
Your main card will be short however much memory is used by your desktop and UI.
At idle with nothing but my two monitors running I am showing 156MB usage on my primary.
If I launch Blender and the current scene I am working on that jumps to 990MB.
You can of course minimize Blender at render time to get a nice chunk of that back but some of it will always be unavailable.
With Blender open at render I show 1860MB used, if I minimize it I show 1703MB used.
Blender itself shows that the scene used 1655.09MB.
If you don’t mind me asking, why are you using 750ti? I hear that 2 750ti area good render combo but seeing two of them are not much cheaper than a 970 (or other 700 cards) was a little turned off about buying a bunch of them.
Also do you only render still image or do you do some animation as well?
I render both stills and animation. (See my sig for a link to my current animation project and detail of render sizes and times)
I have the 750’s because the 900’s were not out when I decided to make the jump to GPU rendering.
At the time I got all three on sale for not much more than what the 770’s were running.
Now that the 900’s are out I would likely make a different choice, probably not a 900 series card.
The numbers I am seeing just do not sell me on the 900’s yet, not for the cost to performance gain I am seeing.
That may change in the future but I tend to buy based on what I know at the moment not what may be later on.
I think the 770/780’s are a better bang for your buck going right now. I’ve seen 4GB 770’s for $200 after rebate.
And while the 780 is closer in price to the 900’s it has more cores, faster memory interface.