poly counts vs. memory

[treddie]

Is there any kind of rough guestimate out there about how much memory you need for so many polys? I'm trying too see how hard I can push my GTX 260 and so I built a 3,000,000 poly mesh with mostly glossy textures, some metallics and some refractive surfaces, and my >1Gb memory just choked in it. So I lowered it to about 2,000,000 polys and its rendering and I figure the noise should be pretty well gone in about 10-15 hours. But for something like 3,000,000 polys, what would be a good card that could deal with it?

Thanks!

[matej]

In the preferences window / CUDA devices, you can see how much memory the scene geometry takes. Write down how much polygons the scene has in your 3D app (take account of modifiers that generate geometry on export) and you have a relation. You can also look at the relation of the .obj file size and mem. usage in Octane.

EDIT: A card with 1.5 GB is the bare minimum for comfy work in my experience. But I usually need more memory for textures, than geometry.

[treddie]

Thank you, Matej. my 260 only has about half that! I'll check out the Octane prefs.