2 GFX cards set up?

[imperialpost]

Hi all,

New to the forums and new to Octane. Very happy with both so far. Just wondering if anyone with could share some expertise.

I recently bought a GTX 980 ti Hybrid to go alongside my Quadro K4000. I have two monitors, one hooked up to each graphics card.

Just wondering if anyone thinks this is the wrong way to have things set up? Should both monitors be in one card? Also any general thoughts on this set up? i would love to optimize everything but I really don't know how to start. Any recommendations for over-clocking the cards a bit, I'm very novice at that.

Thanks!

[artech7]

I think the best optimization would be to have a third card, probably something a little more cheap that can display both monitors off it, while using the other two cards just for rendering. That way, you don't use any resources displaying your monitors.


There isn't anything "technically" wrong with your setup. It works, doesn't it?

My setup is Two Titan Z's that are used for rendering with a small Geforce 210 GT that I use for my display.

I'm not sure about overclocking, I don't do any of that.

Take this with a grain of salt, until someone can correct me or confirm this: I don't think the mhz of the card is terribly important, but the cuda count is. The more Cuda cores the better the performance.

[artech7]

Also, I would like to point out that Octane will scale linearly with each Graphics card you have. So the more the better, essentially, with little to no draw back. So you don't even have to really worry about having different GPU models.

It is recommended to disable SLI when using Octane however. So if you have that enabled, disable it.

[rappet]

...
Take this with a grain of salt, until someone can correct me or confirm this: I don't think the mhz of the card is terribly important, but the cuda count is. The more Cuda cores the better the performance.

Mhz does count too: higher clockspeed means faster rendering. With same architecture I do compare cards by calculation of cudacores x clockspeed.

Edited/added:
You can find some tests I did here (overclocking, sli,...)
viewtopic.php?f=11&t=55946

I find overclocking (gpu on air) not attractive to do, coz' you get a lot of heat extra for little % extra render power.
Even though I do have very good cooled cases and cooled ambient space I do not overclock the gpu's and prefer stable performance.
For overclocking you should go with watercooled gpu.

I find it a waste not to use all ypur gpus for rendering and have one lesser card just for the monitor.
You can have only high performance cards (i.e. Triple 980ti) and use tow for rendering when doing heavy konitor work with other software... and use all three for rendering when need to the speed. You can also set render priority of the monitor card to low, and that way you still can do monitor work while use the card for rendering.

I have a triple monitor setup with triple gpu and hooked each monitor on a a seperate gpu, and that works fine for me.
And if you are not sure.. Just try different setups and find out what works best for you by trial and error.

That's my 2 cents

[imperialpost]

Thanks everybody! Appreciate the input. Seems like the way I have it isn't too bad so will probably keep it as is for now and when I have some free time mess around with different set ups.

Cheers!

[smicha]

K4000 is a very poor cards for rendering and shall be used only for handling monitors if you really need it for some special purpose. Otherwise it has a power of 1/6 of 980Ti so you get same performance by OC 980ti by 16%. More power of your machine depends on your motherboard and a case. With a good motherboard you may add extra hybrids (good choice for up to 4 gpus). And yes - to what rappet said - set low priority to the gpu that handles monitors, always 1st gpu for all monitors.


https://render.otoy.com/octanebench/sum ... adro+K4000

[imperialpost]

K4000 is a very poor cards for rendering and shall be used only for handling monitors if you really need it for some special purpose. Otherwise it has a power of 1/6 of 980Ti so you get same performance by OC 980ti by 16%. More power of your machine depends on your motherboard and a case. With a good motherboard you may add extra hybrids (good choice for up to 4 gpus). And yes - to what rappet said - set low priority to the gpu that handles monitors, always 1st gpu for all monitors.


https://render.otoy.com/octanebench/sum ... adro+K4000

Thanks smicha!

I'm probably going to add some more 980 tis at some point, I don't think my case can fit multiple hybrids though, it's kind of all fanned out.