Second video card to go with GTX Titan

Hi everyone, I have a new pc system only 9 months old and now after some reading I understand I can add a second video card to do just the display of the image to the screen and the card im using now (Titan) will do all the heavy stuff eg rendering, is this true and what would be some good cards you would recommend? I have:

Rampage IV Black edition
i7 4930k CPU
GTX Titan 6GB
64GB ram

I cant afford to buy another Titan for a long while so something less with about 1GB or 2GB would be best but it has to be able to output at 2560 x 1600. Thanks all.

Yes you can add a second card… But do you really need it with your system??? :eek:
Adding a second card in your system will help in Cuda as it will add more cores. But keep in mind that video ram can’t be combined. So if you buy a 2GB card to go with your 6GB Titan, you don’t get 8GB vram.
Just about any gtx card can do 2560x1600 from the 650 to the 980. I personnaly use a GTX 660 TI in my system to drive such a display.

Yes, this works great and is considered the optimal setup, even if you had multiple Titans. I have a GTX460 that I use for my displays and a GTX980 just for rendering. Any card that will support the resolution you want should work. Some people have even gotten AMD cards to play nice for this as well, but your milage may vary.

Tuxon86 - Having a separate display only card frees up the other card(s) just for rendering. This way they don’t have to do double duty with both rendering and handling the display. With this setup you can be rendering and still edit video or browse the net, etc. with no lag or slowdowns.

With his hardware setup, I don’t think that browsing the web is really a problem… :evilgrin:
But I see your point. If I had the need and more money to burn, I would go with a GTX 980 for display, but I would get a Tesla, or a couple of tesla for rendering instead of a Titan.

I think that in general you would find that the Titans are faster than the Teslas, or the Quadros for that matter. This is just what I have seen in render tests over the years with various renderers. I’m not sure if it’s because the Teslas/Quadros are optimised for double precision number crunching or it’s something else. Most GPU renderers are single precision only so they don’t benefit from double precision calculations anyway and Geforce cards are a hell of a lot cheaper too. :smiley:

Yeah, but think of the bragging right… :evilgrin:

Thank you everyone I have some time now to research and figure out on the next card I will buy I think I will add one that has as many cuda cores as possible in the $200 range, my next question is how do I set up blender to use the display card as just the display and to use the Titan for the “rendered” option in the viewport shading in the 3d viewport when using cycles rendering? When I have two cards does it mean I will have the processing power of both cards in cuda cores together?

Yes, but the memory does not add up. Because your scene needs to be copies to both cards the renderer can only count on the amount of memory in the smallest card, so it makes that restriction on all cards.

To set Blender up to use the cards, just go to preferences and under the system tab you can determine how and on which cards you want Cycles to render.

Whoa!! “The renderer can only count on the amount of memory in the smallest card”, I wont be using the smaller card for rendering but if I add a second card just for the display isn’t there a way to have it just as display and not use the second cards cuda, that way I can have the titan use all 6GB of vram and all the titans cuda cores and not the two cards combined cuda cores?

Yes, you just pick the card you want to render with in the preferences.

I wanted to ask the same thing, although I have a much weaker card for rendering (GTX580), but I’d like to keep my system responsive while the 580 is working so I’m going to need something for display.
Can I get away with something like a GeForce 210, 610, 720, etc? Or should it be something more powerful like @Grimm mentioned the 460? I want to watch out for my power supply with this, so keeping it low profile should be favorable.

Also how is your 980 performing mate? Compared for example to the 780? I’m thinking of swapping the good old 580 for something with more memory, I’m probably going for the 780 but I’m curious.

Thanks, cheers!

If you can, you should try to spring for a 750(ti), they are fairly powerful (maybe more than my 460) and use much less power. Otherwise any of those you mention should work fine.

I’m very happy with the 980, it’s much faster than my 460 and uses less power. :slight_smile: Any speed comparison depends on which program you are running on the card. On Cycles the card is faster than a 680, but slower than a 780. It looks like the devs are working on speeding that up so we will see what they can do. On Octane the devs have significantly sped up the card to about the same speed as a 780 and just below a Titan Black. The 780ti still blows the 980 out of the water though. :smiley:

Thank you for the detailed answer, the 750 or the ti version both seem to be really good value for the money. Will give myself some time to think about it (at least until the post-Christmas price-drops :smiley: )