Hi I’m planning on buying a 970 to take full advantage of gpu rendering, but since i’ve got a decent cpu (3930k if you ask) I certainly don’t want to waste that, is there a way of taking advantage of both for rendering? I’m on Win 8 + Blender 2.72b, cheers!
I think that you will find that your 970 will be so much faster than your CPU that it wouldn’t matter if you did have them rendering at the same time.
Exactly this, however if you still wanted to… you could open two blenders at the same time and render to the same output folder with placeholders enabled and overwrite turned off… CPU will process one frame, GPU will process the rest.
There is a point where GPU will be a bit disappointing. I’m running 6x2 cores at 2.6ghz, and finding myself looking for another option. That said, I think you will be happy with the 970 on this build.
As far as I know, there are some things that still use CPU in cycles, and some things that use GPU. The goal is to make everything GPU, because it is faster, but I wouldn’t worry so much about that. Get the fastest processor you can afford and feel is appropriate, but don’t worry if it’d “go to waste”, in social psychology that’s called “sunk cost”. Just because your nice processor won’t be fully utilized in cycles render does not change the fact that it provides future proofing and better general performance.
Hi, render my benchmark with 16x16 Tiles and compare it to the GTX 970 entries on page 6.
http://www.blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?350975-The-new-Cycles-GPU-2-72-Benchmark
Cheers, mib