What's the best GPU for Blender Cycles?
polycounter lvl 10
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.
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.
Replies
This is a website for video game art.
Just saying.
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 + -
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
As far as I know, Cycles actually uses the GPU.
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.
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.
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.