hardware good enough?

[irene]

Hi everybody! I' m on an ASUS P5Q PRO board with 4 GB of RAM (3 GB functional under Windows XP) and about to buy a GTX 460 graphics card. As a 3D hobbyist I have not had files bigger than 100 MB so far. My biggest HDRI are 190 MB. I am not planning to increase these sizes much.

Could you please help me with these 2 questions:
-is that hardware good enough for octanerender?
-would a 1GB graphics card be sufficient? I only found 2 cards with 2GB in the stores here and prefer some of the 1GB models.

Thank you very much!

[necko77]

If you are hobbist then gtx460 with 2 GB will be more then enough for you.
i had a 9800 gtx and i quickly reached memory maximum. Now with 2 gb of ram i dont have problems and its much faster even gtx460 dont use all procesors(whaiting for cuda 3.2).
Am architect and GTX460 2 gb is good solution for my biz and my needs
dont buy cards with 1 gb its not enough

[irene]

Thank you very much, necko77, that helps a lot!

I forgot to write the board is ASUS P5Q PRO with a INTEL Core 2 Duo E8400 2*3 GHz Processor on it.

[matej]

I have a similar comp (Asus P5K-E). Octane works ok.

It's just that currently Octane eats also a lot of system RAM - depending on amount of geometry. If you do geometry intensive scenes, your system ram will be the bottleneck here, not VRAM of the video card. Anyway, I wold still go for the GTX 460 with 2GB.

[irene]

Hi, matej! Thanks a lot for your answer, things are getting clearer.
So I might go out later and buy the card with 2GB.
Just asking back about "geometry": Does it mean polygon numbers in meshes? I am still stuck with simple things and model myself, without practically using high polygon readymade content. I also read somewhere in this forum, that the strong system RAM use would decrease after further software development. Is that correct? Would 3GB of system RAM work for now?

[alexmat]

Hi Irene,
Just look at your Power Supply Unit (PSU) if it can handle a gtx 460.
Mine didn't and I'm too lazy to replace it plus the card.
I switched to a gts 450 with 1gb, it's better than my previous 8800 gt with 512mb but definitly not as good a solution as a gtx 460 2gb.
Just my two cents.
Alex

[matej]

Yeah, geometry means polygons.

Use of system ram will probably decrease, as Octane gets optimized. How much powerful hardware is enough, depends entirely on what you are doing. I would say that if you are able to render your stuff with the current beta demo version, you'll be able to render it better with the current licensed version and even more so with the final release(s).

[irene]

Hi Alex! Thank you for your comment! That is exactly the question, I am still unsure about, I've been measuring consumption in the current system for 2 days now. My 525 watt power supply should do. Still, I do not like to use too much power for anything... But the new graphic cards are all more consuming than my old Radeon 3870, also the Radeon ones, which are a bit lower in consumption, but: no CUDA!!

Thank you again, matej, for further information!

And yes, now comes the great moment, ta-daaaah, just got Gainward GTX 460 with 2 GB, ~ 160 Watt max... about to try it -- wish me the best!

[matej]

I'm running everything (+3 disks & 3 fans) with a 550W PSU, so you shouldn't have a problem there.

[pixelrush]

I just chip in here that to fully utilise a 2gb card you really need 8gb memory and therefore 64bit O/S.
You could add some memory and do a dual boot with either Linux or Win7 to run Octane.
I have this arrangement and it works well.