HARDWARE SETUP

[erikals]

a lightwave plugin would be nice.

[mcgarianala]

Thanks for the response.

I've seen somewhere in the forum that Octane needs a separate card for the viewport. Would an onboard graphics work as viewport?

Supermicro has a mobo (http://www.supermicro.com/products/moth ... DTG-QF.cfm) and Superserver (http://www.supermicro.com/products/syst ... fm?GPU=TC4) that can support support 4 GPUs while having an integrated Matrox G200eW Graphics chip. If i can make use of said onboard graphics, i can populate all four PCIe X16 slots with GTX 480.

However, there is a possibility is to use one of the PCIe 2.0 4X (Slot No. 2 - X16 Physically) and add a video card for viewport. As such, is there any minimum specs for the viewport card?

Gari

[timbarnes]

When I had only a GTX470, navigation was pretty difficult. I've just added a Quadro FX 580 (from Ebay), and after messing around a lot I have it installed in the 16X slot, with the GTX 470 in the 4X slot. I have my main monitor connected to the 580, and a smaller secondary monitor connected to the 470. Octane is displayed on the main screen (handled by the 580), but I only render on the 470.

The result is that when I'm not using Octane, I have my big screen set up well for CAD applications and OpenGL, and the smaller one for menus and file browsers etc. When I am using Octane, I get good interactive performance on the main screen, and the secondary screen becomes sluggish, but it's less important.

I'm running the latest Quadro drivers on the 580, and the latest Geforce drivers on the 470. It all seems to work fine.

I'm not seeing any performance loss in Octane due to having the 470 on the 4X slot: Radiance has stated that it's only significant during the time to load a model into memory, which happens once. Rendering speed seems to be fine.

I haven't tried to use onboard graphics. I do know that I was not able to use an ATI card to coexist with the 470, so I sold it and replaced it with the nVidia Quadro board.

Hope this helps,

tim