I’m in the middle of a video project at the moment and I’ve got a lot of rendering ahead of me, at the moment I’m finding that my GPU rendering in Cycles is actually slower than my CPU, so I’m thinking of upgrading my graphics card.
Now I’m already painfully aware that my graphics card is not up to much but I had this built a couple of years ago and I asked for a graphics card that was CUDA enabled and this was what I got.
I’m finding that my CPU rendering is faster than the GPU, in fact I just rendered the same frame on both and the difference was around 3 minutes.
I’m prepared to throw a bit of money at this but let’s start at £200 for the moment, I might stretch to £300 but it all depends on whether it’s worth it for how much faster results I’m going to get.
You have a good CPU and a very bad GPU. In nvidia, you should not buy anything lower than a "GTX " card. i7 3770 gives similar times to an GTX 750 on simple scenes. In more complex scenes including volumetrics or hair, i7 3770 may be even faster than a GTX 960. If you’re considering buying a new nvidia card, it is important that at least have 4GB vRAM. In short, to ensure that your GPU will be better than your CPU, you buy a GTX 970 or better.
Cycles now also supports ATI cards (less features than nvidia for now), so you could also find out about it.
Thanks for that, really appreciated it. So the GTX 960 is clearly in my price range at £159 on Amazon, but the next step up is the GTX 970 which rocks in at £260, again with in my buying power but is it worth the extra £100? Also I notice in both cases there are EVGA and MSI versions of the cards, is this just brand?
Sorry if I have not explained well, but you “do not buy a GTX 960” if you already have an i7 3770 CPU! (believe me, I have an i7 3770 and GTX 960 and no difference in performance in complex scenes). If you choose nvidia, you go for a GTX 970.
Another thing, if your motherboard has two PCIe slots for graphics cards, you keep the GT 640 to use it as a primary display while you use the GTX 970 to render.
Edit:
EVGA and MSI are good brands. Anyway they usually have different models of GTX 970, with different levels of factory overclock and cooling systems. Before buying some of them you search in Internet reviews with benchmarks for these cards.
Yeah sorry I got carried away and searched for the 960. So the 970 is £260 and the 980 is sits between £380 and £400, I guess I have to establish if the 970 is that much faster that my CPU and then to determine if the 980 is that much faster than the 970.
I think you would be happy with the 970, but the 900 series cards use the Maxwell chip set and they are not optimized in Cycles yet. So they are not as fast as they could be if they were optimized. I have a 980 and it is faster than a 970 but only by about 20%. The 970 has a good price to core ratio, if you want to spend more money than you should probably save up for a 980ti. It’s about 45% faster than a 970 and has more vram. It’s up to you to decide if the cost is worth it or not.
“I can’t make a decision on my own, I’m only an elected official” OK thanks for that, not sure I can stretch to the TI but I guess it might be worth it in the long run.
OK so I ended up finding a brand new 980 ti on ebay, won the auction for £460 an absolute steal last minute but the guy never sent the card out! I’m due to get my money back from Paypal this week but it’s really set me back rendering wise. The only upside from all this is that it has given me time to do some thinking and research, I’m set on buying the 980 ti now but now getting hold of the model I had set on is proving difficult. I’m liking the EVGA but it’s availability is not great, the MSI is so much easier to get hold of but was wondering if anyone has any experience with either model and what they would recommend? I have an MSI motherboard in my set up.
