What's the best GPU for Blender Cycles?

melviso

I intend to upgrade my gpu card in order to utilize cycles properly.So I wanted to ask the blender users here what gpu cards they use and how long does the rendering take.

I would appreciate any recommendation I can get.I am hoping Cycles rendering becomes faster cause Modo's renderer is crazy even with my current system specs it rendered the same scene in 1 min with no noise.Cycles even after 5 mins at 220 still had a lot of noise.I hope Cycles gets improved.

Btw,I am impressed with how well they have now integrated Maya's presets and configurations into Blender especially with the right click button enabling u to switch between vertices,edges and faces.

Right now,I no longer miss Maya while using it.Its way better than Maya especially for modeling as I can add edge loops and switch to sculpt mode to move points around.

ghaztehschmexeh

You just dismissed real-time rendering in another thread, and now you are asking for help on cycles. Thus you have declared that you aren't working with video games any more.

This is a website for video game art.

Just saying.

melviso

Cool down ghaztehschmexeh,I am here to get better and I am not interested in making videogames but in how to optimize my workflow as a 3d generalist.

Shrike

Im not sure what this blender cycles stuff is , but offline render engines use your CPU (and ram) to get their images, not the GPU. The gpu is only for the viewport.
There are 1-2 exeptions but nothing you will have heard off and only archviz/movie stuff, so im pretty sure you only need CPU power.

The most important thing is that you have a CPU with 8 threads, so a i7 or a AMD with 8 cores. i5 only have 4 threads and thus half the rendering power + -

mAlkAv!An

What's your current GPU and what's your budget?
There is a cycles benchmark over at belenderartist forums. Give it a go and compare your result with others to get an idea of what's possible.
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?239480-2-61-Cycles-render-benchmark
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0As2oZAgjSqDCdElkM3l6VTdRQjhTRWhpVS1hZmV3OGc#gid=0

Jesse Meyer

Define "best".

Santewi

Shrike wrote: »

Im not sure what this blender cycles stuff is , but offline render engines use your CPU (and ram) to get their images, not the GPU. The gpu is only for the viewport.
There are 1-2 exeptions but nothing you will have heard off and only archviz/movie stuff, so im pretty sure you only need CPU power.

The most important thing is that you have a CPU with 8 threads, so a i7 or a AMD with 8 cores. i5 only have 4 threads and thus half the rendering power + -

As far as I know, Cycles actually uses the GPU.

Signovinces

Shrike wrote: »

Im not sure what this blender cycles stuff is , but offline render engines use your CPU (and ram) to get their images, not the GPU. The gpu is only for the viewport.
There are 1-2 exeptions but nothing you will have heard off and only archviz/movie stuff, so im pretty sure you only need CPU power.

The most important thing is that you have a CPU with 8 threads, so a i7 or a AMD with 8 cores. i5 only have 4 threads and thus half the rendering power + -

NVIDIA cards are supported by Blender. Seems that ATI/AMD cards aren't going to be supported anytime soon. When i switched to a NVIDIA card my rendering times were 5-10 times faster using my GPU.

3ds max has GPU rendering support as well. Don't know about Maya.

melviso

@Shrike -Em...gpu rendering is very popular now because its very fast and stable.A lot of renderers are now switching to gpu for renders.Cycles and Vray 2.0 are some examples of gpu renderers.

Cycles is currently being improved to be faster.I haven't tried Vray 2.0 though.I have to say Modo's renderer is the fastest when I tried it.I don't know if it uses cpu or gpu but with my crappy system specs,it renders 7x faster than cycles.

@mAlkAv!An-- I am using a Geoforce 9500 gt card.Its CUDA capacity is not enough to run cycles.
Thanks for the links.

@Signovinces I don't think Maya supports gpu rendering.Maya has mental ray which uses CPU to render and its really fast.Mental ray hasn't released a gpu version yet.

Also found this:
http://www.blenderguru.com/the-ultimate-guide-to-buying-a-computer-for-blender/

Very informative.

ZacD

Most 3d apps can support gpu rendering through other rendering tools, Maya has FurryBall for example.

Any newer Nvidia card will work well. There's no best card, just the best for your budget.

If you are doing large and complex scenes, the amount of vram your card has becomes a lot more important.