However! Unfortunately, I discovered that Blender, Cinema4d and other 3d apps now suffer from hiccups, delays and generally dismal viewport performance, to the point that it's unusable. The issue lies with the new 4xxx line of consumer cards: Nvidia crippled either the hardware, or the drivers, or both. They remain silent on this issue, which only proves in my opinion that this was done to save their Quadro profits.
Now, here's my problem: if I stick with the 480, I get great gaming (which I hardly do anymore), great Octane rendering, but I cannot bear using the 3d apps (where I spend most of my time). Animating is horrible now.
If I go back to my 280 I lose the render speed.
I can use my 280 as my main card, and the 480 as a rendering card. But it just does not feel right. So I am thinking about returning the 480, and switching to ATI (whose opengl performance runs circles around the current crop of Nvidia cards), and use my 280 as a rendering option for Octane for now. I have no idea whether the 580 runs into the same problems, or not.
My question to the Octane developer team: doesn't this development on the side of Nvidia concern you? Are you aware of this problem? Suddenly the prospect of buying these cards become much less attractive, in my opinion. I refuse to get a Quadro, especially now that Nvidia is forcing the matter in this unethical way. I would rather give up on Nvidia, and get an ATI in the future, even though I lose the render option of Octane. Or wait it out for ATI to get their drivers in line with CUDA, and wait for an ATI compatible version of Octane.
It seems Nvidia is not only screwing (pardon my French here, but that is exactly the word that covers my feelings atm) their loyal customer base, but even more important, they are doing developers like Refractive no favour at all either. This may have a big impact on your product in the long run. What are your thoughts? Is this a hardware issue, or is there a way to circumvent this through a patch, or something? Nvidia remains stubbornly silent (I did send them the same question to address this issue - no answers).
It's a no-win situation. Unless you have money to burn, of course
Now whenever I work with '2D' content (like nodes, or just tweaking materials), and return to the 3D viewport, I get a two second lag before it starts to navigate it smoothly. It's like the card gets in 'sleep mode', whenever there is no need to draw 3D stuff for some moments. I don't know if this is the same issue, but recently I hear more and more reports that the new series of GeForces are not that good in 3D apps.
I truly believe Nvidia has shot themselves in their foot with this. (Reading some other articles it was mentioned that Nvidia regards the 480 line as a failed product, and their intention is to end it asap.) At this point I need to work in the viewports more than I require the Octane renderer, so I will see what the future brings.
= please start porting octane's code to ATI stream.