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I'd be interested in purchasing Octane and a GPU that runs it well, but I can't wait for my budget to accumulate because I have to get the new desktop immediately as my old computer is beyond repair and there are some deadlines that need to be met. Anyway, I'm considering GTX 460 1GB for now, and adding another one later. I intend to use them for SLI gaming from time to time, and since Octane doesn't support SLI I'm wondering do I have to disconnect the SLI bridge when using them with Octane, or is a software disabling of SLI enough?

I'm a fairly modest renderer, I'm quite sure 1600x1200 is the max resolution I'll render, and I'll mostly use Octane for house decoration jobs and single objects like speakers. The million polygon limit doesn't sound constricting at all, am I terribly wrong? Are there any examples of a scene that'd be on the limits of what a 1GB card can render? Comparison pictures between 512MB, 768MB, 1GB and 2GB or the such would help lots too.

I'm considering the 768MB too because I could get one really cheap used, or is that way too little?

Since VRam is not added for octane it is to consider what to do later on.
If you buy a 768 MB card today is this your limit for all time, even you buy a 2 GB card later.
A 4096 x 4096 pixel picture has 150 MB unpacked, and it has to be unpacked in VRam for octane.
I have reached my 786 MB fast with projects with many smaller textures.

Today i would go for a 2 GB card, or, take a cheap gts or quadro for monitor and first tests with octane
and put another card GTX 400/500 later only for octane.

Cheers mib

Just to clarify, if you buy a 768MB card for now and a 2GB one later,
You can use the 768MB card for your OS display and use the 2GB for octane.
It's only when you decide to use both at the same time you'll be limited to 768MB.

In this case i would buy a cheaper card with 768MB and then a fast 2GB one and only use the 2nd card for rendering once you have it.

Yours,
Radiance

Same when you have the new gtx 580 now and a new ( when it happend ) with 3 Gb?
Is it the same when you have in this case two 580 cards with different Gb? Just to clarify

Burkhard wrote:Same when you have the new gtx 580 now and a new ( when it happend ) with 3 Gb?
Is it the same when you have in this case two 580 cards with different Gb? Just to clarify

It's simple, whatever cards you enable for use by octane render (eg all the cards you add to the active device list), you end up having the memory of the lowest one of those available. (as the scene needs to fit in all GPUs that are active).
So if you have a tiny 256MB GPU that is in your system but not used by octane (eg it's inactive), it won't affect the memory available.

Radiance

To be honest, 4096px wide texture sounds excessive, and even that's an understatement. I'm sure I won't be using even 2048px most of the time.

Anyway, I got the Gigabyte GTX 460 1GB OC, I hope it'll be enough for semi-casual Octane doodling. I won't be doing any photorealistic Lamborghinis and I'm quite interested in optimizing my models poly count and using tiling textures efficiently, so perhaps I'll survive, don't you think? Atleast it's a fun challenge! I would've gotten the 2GB version but there aren't any in Finland.

EDIT: I'll post results and observations when I get the parts for the computer and Windows 7.

pocket rocket wrote:To be honest, 4096px wide texture sounds excessive, and even that's an understatement. I'm sure I won't be using even 2048px most of the time.

Anyway, I got the Gigabyte GTX 460 1GB OC, I hope it'll be enough for semi-casual Octane doodling. I won't be doing any photorealistic Lamborghinis and I'm quite interested in optimizing my models poly count and using tiling textures efficiently, so perhaps I'll survive, don't you think? Atleast it's a fun challenge! I would've gotten the 2GB version but there aren't any in Finland.

EDIT: I'll post results and observations when I get the parts for the computer and Windows 7.

You can do some pretty decent scenes with 1GB, as long as you are carefull not to waste memory where not needed (eg keep polycounts as low as possible and use the smallest textures required from your view(s)

Radiance

I managed to test some of my heaviest (not best though ) 90MB .blend scenes after converting them to .obj, worked right off the bat and my GPU RAM use was at 500MB, excellent! I'm quite happy that my previous desktop died and that I got this new one, Octane is really awesome! Thanks for the help, Radiance, consider this case closed.