Curretntly I have a GT 740 4GB video card for rendering but most I use for rendering my scenes is around 100-200MB… My scenes are really simple and dont require much memory at this stage in my career. I even tried to max my card out with 20x 200x200 segments UV spheres and it only got to 659MB, My scenes wont have that kind of complexity for quite some time, Im still just learning lighting and textures so my objects wont be very complex.
should I go for a faster low memory video card for now?
I would recommend that. If you aren’t going to be running against the memory needs, there is no need for it. I have a quadro k4200 and a gtx 750ti, and I have never run out of vram, even in production scenes with a fair bit of textures. But that is just my experience, I know a lot of people swear that you need to have as much ram as possible, but I just don’t see the need.
Ok cool thanx! Ill be going with the GTX 760 for sure, I should see a nice bump in render times
Sure thing, and keep that 740 in there too for a little boost in speed. at least for testing, sometimes it hurts more than it helps, but it’s worth checking out.
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I also have that GTX 750ti, and it’s a great card for the price. I also had previous nvidia card installed, and it also has the capability to render on gpu with cuda, but it is very slow. This is troublesom if the speed difference is big.
First I thought I will render with both cards, but then I realised that the old card is so slow, that when it was still rendering the last tile, the 750ti had done its work and was waiting for the slow card to finish the tile. It was (for me) a lot faster to render with only 750ti, than together with slow card.
Just my thoughts when buying additional faster card.
Cool I didn’t know Blender used SLI, so does each card have its own tile?
No, Blender don’t use SLI. And actually I’ve read somewhere that connecting the cards with SLI makes them perhaps slower.
Blender detects supported cuda cards and then user can select which one of them is used. Multiple cards can be used and then one gpu calculates one tile at a time when other gpu calculates other. Yes, it’s amazing!