All about Nvidia GTX 460

[hypergrafica]

Hi, just to collect all stuff about Nvidia 460 in one place.
And now some questions:
1) It seems that this Graphics card chipset is not fully sopported from Octane yet. Are there problems in development of Octane or Nvidia hasn't realesed the right cuda Toolkit or drivers?
2) Is the long awaited release 2.3 of octane that adds full support to Fermi 104 (gtx 460 family)?
3) What are the current benchmarks of 460 vs 470 or 480? What will be the theoretical increase of performance of gtx 460 with the new 2.3 version of octane?
4) What about the release date of the final version of octane?
5) What are the differences in terms of image dimensions or quality or speed with 2 gb video memory instead of 1 gb?
These are just a few questions that are in my opinion important to know for every user of octane who needs to upgrade his graphics card, but especially for potential new users and customers.
Thanks in advance for every contribution and congratulations to all the refractive software team.

[matej]

1.) As I gathered on the forums we (460 owners) will have to wait for CUDA 3.2 that will address the problem of 1/3 unused cores.
2.) No
3.) There's a lot of benchmark threads on the forums. The differences between Fermi processors correspond to the difference in CUDA cores (someone correct me, if I'm wrong). The theoretical increase of 460 performance will be form 100% to 150%
4.) When its done? Probably nobody knows the date, but 2.3beta is the last beta - that means final could be close (I would guess-hope ~2 months)
5.) Render speed has nothing to do with RAM amount. With more ram you can load bigger textures / more geometry / render bigger images. If you are buying a 460 there is no reason to even consider 1GB variants.

[havensole]

matej has done a great job answering your questions. my only point is to question:
4) As said, when it's done. With the amount of bugs we've seen with the 2.3 beta I foresee it being the ~2months speculated above. There is a lot of work that needs to be done to make everything stable for everyone's systems, get Linux and OSX versions, add new features, and let the developers get some sleep somewhere in between. Also it doesn't help that Radiance has been sick again. We need to stop pestering the poor guys to relieve some stress on their shoulders (not saying you're stressing them, but us as a community).

[hypergrafica]

Thanks to matej and havensole for the quick and precise replay. I read about Radiance health problems and whish him a speedy recovery
To sommarize, if someone wants to approach GPU rendering with octane, the nvidia gtx 460 family is in name only a good choice because it uses only 36 of the 48 shader units per SM at the moment

http://www.refractivesoftware.com/forum ... &start=170

"We added the requirements for use of the new GTX460 48 shader units per SM, but it does'nt seem to work.
I think we need to compile against cuda 3.1 (the GTX460 was not around when cuda 3.0 was released).

We've been working hard to get 3.1 working as nvidia changed stuff that broke octane with 3.1.
We hope the next version support cuda 3.1 if we can resolve the issue with nvidia's help.

EDIT: apparently this is only supported with the upcoming cuda 3.2, so i think owners of a GTX460 will have to wait a few weeks before they have full rendering power/GPU use.

Radiance"

Better choice (when considering benchmarks) is still the GTX 480 that costs now about 360 € against the 230 € of the 460 with 2GB memory (better however in terms of heating, power consumption and amount of memory). Things might go better for GTX 460 in an indeterminate future, waiting for a more optimized GTX 480 architecture and the first final release of octane.

[havensole]

Yeah it is weird how Nvidia put in that thing with the GTX460's cores. I still think they're good buys for the money. Hopefully soon we'll see octane able to crack into those missing cores. But the memory is the big thing 2x GTX460's are more powerful than a single GTX480, draw less power, produce less heat, more ram, and cost roughly the same. If they had been out at the initial release I probably would have bought 2 of them versus 2 gtx470's.

[Jaberwocky]

Hi all,I've just joined and bought the software.Hopefully i can contribute something here.I am running a Gigabyte GTX460 1GB model.Seems to run pretty fast to me on the 2.2b beta software.Thing is with the 460.The overclocking is great.I am running it at Gigabyte stock of (715Mhz).I know that if pushed i can get it to 820 Mhz stable to reduce rendering times and possibly higher if i over volt it using afterburner.If what your saying is correct and future versions of Cuda/Octane will release more cores then the card is an absolute bargain.If anyone needs a cheap GTX460 for Rendering then check out the overclockers.co.uk web site.They are currently offering the Palit 768MB GTX460 for £112 inc VAT.In terms of Memory usage.I have tried one test at 4000 x 3000 pixels and the card showed around 500-600 MB used out of the 993 MB available.

[havensole]

Sounds great. The 460's really are one of the best cards available. I hope that Nvidia releases higher core/memory versions to compete with the 470/480 models. Be careful when OC'ing your GPU. This can have dire results as the cooling system is not really designed for the GPU to be running at full throttle 100% of the time, so OC'ing it can produce more heat and kill your card. Granted this is worst case scenario. More likely you will get a black screen if it overheats and/or the system could shut down.

[Jaberwocky]

O'c the 460 is not a problem with heat.Recommended Max for the 460 is spec'ed on the Nvidia Site as 104 deg C max.If i overclock and run full tilt it will only reach 70C.Plenty of headroom.Thats why i bought a 460 rather then 470/80.The die shrink on the 460 generally produces the thermal goods plus the Gigabyte version has upgraded Fan/Heatsink and better quality components.

[hypergrafica]

Hi!
Hope good news from Nvidia:

http://blogs.nvidia.com/ntersect/2010/0 ... .html#more

"Full fermi support..."

hoping good news for octane and nvidia gtx 460 owners too.