Advice in buying a new graphics card for Octane Tweet

[rojharris]

I've installed the plugin and its running perfectly. Its an amazing integration, much nicer than the lightwave one I have, although thats great too.
One issue though is that almost all my scenes are un-renderable due to memory limitations. I have a GTX580 with 1.5Gb and its just not enough. So, whats the best card to get? Should I go for a 6GB Titan, which is expensive at £800 but seems awesome, or the GTX690, also £800 and dual core but only 4GB. Maybe the 690 is faster for Octane? I don't know, but am I correct to think that the daz plugin will only use one core anyway and not all the 4GB memory? Whereas the Titan will get all of its 6BG used...

Also, If I install the Titan, can I keep the 580 in the machine for driving the displays and somehow make Octane use the Titan for rendering, or does the 580 cripple the system and make octane default to the lower spec??

Many thanks for any help and sorry if this is in the wrong thread, but its because I need to get the Daz plugin working for my scenes.

Roger

[t_3]

hi rojharris!
i have moved this as new topic to the support forum, since it makes a good start for some gpu shopping advice thread

to answer your questions: any GTX *90 card i know of is usually marketed as e.g. 4GB card, but in fact it's 2 gpus with 2GB each - so you won't gain much from a 1.5GB GTX 580, since octane needs its amount of vram on any single gpu in use.

if you are willing to pay the price, the Titan is definitely the way to go. all the 6** kepler cards are not that big improvement in terms of rendering speed (if any at all), esp. if you have a GTX 580 already. a 3GB GTX 580 is still a good bet, if you can grab one for cheap, but the optimum as of to date is without a doubt the Titan - roughly a single Titan will give twice the power of a single GTX 580. this plus 6GB vram is PLENTY power to play with octane and the Titan is also known to use less power provide lower temps, btw.

mixing any sort of nvidia cards should be no problem. if you get a Titan and keep the 580 to use it for display exclusively (e.g. untick it in the plugin), this will get a pretty fast system to work with, plenty speed & vram for DS open gl, and big power for octane...

[rojharris]

Great, thanks t_3. Looks like the Titan is the way to go. Its not available here in the UK until the 5th April, so I have to wait a little while.

Many thanks
Roger