Cycles - unable to switch to GPU

So I’m doing some work on cycles and it’s rendering quite slowly. I’ve heard you can switch to GPU rendering rather than CPU so I do some research. I find that because my graphics card is Intel, I have to use OpenCL. So I do some more researching and use a batch file to open blender with CYCLES_OPENCL_TEST=ALL. Now I can select my graphics card (Intel® HD Graphics) in System Preferences. I can now selct GPU Compute rather than CPU in my render options. I do that but whenever I try to render something, I ge - OpenCL Build Failed: Errors in Console.

Please could somebody help me out

If your graphics card is ‘intel’… IIRC this just means that the cpu is doing a bunch of gpu based calculations… you will render faster via cpu rather then getting opencl to work. OpenCL is really only useful for AMD based graphics cards (not AMD cpus)…

Also when creating these sorts of posts in future, you should also mention your cpu model / gpu model / ram / os that you are using. It will help us figure out what exactly is the problem.

Try investing on a Nvidia card GeForce 9800 series will do. Don’t forget to install CUDA driver.

what is the CUDA Driver? i thought the card drivers etc were all it needed?

How would I go about getting a Nvidia card and then how would I use it?

How would I find them out. I opened DirectX Diagnostics and under display then under device name it just says Intel® HD graphics

What machine are you using ? Are you using a laptop or desktop. If a laptop then you’ll have to buy a new machine which has a dedicated Nvidia graphics card. If a desktop, buy a graphics card, open the computer case, plug in the graphics card and install supplied drivers.

Is there no way otherwise if I have a laptop?

You cannot just cram a new graphics card into a laptop that is designed not to use one.

So I have to buy a new Laptop with an Nvidia graphics card?

The 2.75 version of Cycles will have OpenCL support (meaning that you will be able to use the Intel onboard graphics or an ATI card as a computing device). Though I don’t really expect the Intel graphics to give much of a boost if the chip is more than a few years old.

The 9xxx series of NVidia GPU’s stopped being Cycles compatible ages ago, IIRC either the GTX 5xx or greater GPU’s are required (maybe 4xx?)