Hello, I have a few Questions

[shield]

Hello all,

I have some ideas and wonder if they are possible, or will be possible in the future.

I plan on building a new workstation in the future and I am wondering about possible GPU configurations, currently the best Nvidia gaming card Octane supports is the GTX480, I would like to know in the future as Nvidia finishes developing the new GTX490 Dual GPU card, will it be supported and will it increase performance as if I were to use 2 separate GTX 480's? Basically I want to use the EVGA SR-2 motherboard and eventually use four GTX480's or four GTX490 dual gpu's in one system, the GTX490 arrangement would mean eight GPU cores on four full PCIe 16x slots. will these upcoming dual gpu cards be supported by Octane or just the single GPU cards?

If one GTX480 is 50 times faster than a i7 920, would four GTX490's mean it will render 400 time faster?
Are four GTX480's supported now, and would four GTX480's be 200 times faster than a i7 920?

How soon will AMD/ATI GPU's be supported? Because they seem to be faster and have higher memory at 2 Gigabytes per card than Nvidia as fare as gaming cards are concerned and already have a top of the line dual gpu card the HD5970. Four of those would be interesting as well.

Because High end gaming cards are much more cheaper than high end workstation cards, it would be more cost effective to go with the gaming cards for processing power at present I think.

I would like to have a good upgrade path for my new workstation system, with the SR-2 as the base, that's why I want to know about these possibility's, so I can add more gpu's later If needed after I get a not so fully loaded system up and running using the SR-2 motherboard.

I'm very interested in GPU rendering and its speed increases because it gives the ability to use only GPU's as a means of processing power somewhat like a one PC render farm, instead of having to build multiple PC's to get the equivelent rendering speed increases as advertised with Octane.

[havensole]

Hi there. Being as the 490 is still in the pre-production stage how it'll exactly work is sill unknown. There theoretically shouldn't be any issues as it will use CUDA. What kind of performance it has is just up in the air right now. Typically when you add a gtx4xx card to the render you get roughly x1.9 speed up.

We used 6 gtx480's on a system at our booth at Siggraph this year. It ran fine, tough I have to say from my experience I had better stability with using that many gpu's under Linux. Its not an Octane thing, but an OS/driver thing.

As far as AMD/ATI support, that is a long way off as that will rely on OpenCL becoming a lot more mature than it currently is. This has been a big debate in another forum so I'll just leave it at that.