NEW GRAPHICS CARD

[larmannjan]

i am going to get 1 NEW GRAPHICS CARD AND ONLY USE THAT ONE. IM AM WILLING TO SPEND ABOUT $400 ON IY. so WHICH ONE?

[radiance]

Hi,

Please don't post WITH CAPITALS, it's as if your shouting.
We recommend the GTX460 or 560, preferably with 2GB video ram if you can find one.

Radiance

[drBouvierLeduc]

Sorry to hijack this thread, but it's probably not worth opening a new one for the same kind of question :
I already have a GTX560 with only 1GB of ram. It's very fast, unfortunately a bit short ram-wise for octane.
So, I spotted a cheap 430 GTS with 2Gb of ram that I would like to use as a secondary graphic card : will it work with octane ?
I would like to use the 2Gb ram of the GTS, along with the computing power of the 2 cards.

On a sidenote, it would be nice to put that kind of information on the f.a.q I guess.

[Jaberwocky]

Sorry to hijack this thread, but it's probably not worth opening a new one for the same kind of question :
I already have a GTX560 with only 1GB of ram. It's very fast, unfortunately a bit short ram-wise for octane.
So, I spotted a cheap 430 GTS with 2Gb of ram that I would like to use as a secondary graphic card : will it work with octane ?
I would like to use the 2Gb ram of the GTS, along with the computing power of the 2 cards.

On a sidenote, it would be nice to put that kind of information on the f.a.q I guess.

you would have a problem with that configuration.

You could add the cores but you would only be using the card with the minimum of ram IE the 1GB in the 560. The 2nd 1Gb populated in the 430 would go to waste.

Either use the 430 on its own for rendering and let it chug away in the background while playing Crysis 2 on the 560 .That way the 2GB would come into play or get a 2nd 560 1GB and double up the cores for faster performance whilst just using 1GB memory.

[drBouvierLeduc]

mmmh, this is confusing !
So, to put it clear : if I plug the 2gb GTS430 as my main card, and the 1gb GTX560 as the secondary one, octane will use 2gb ram and the processing power of both cards, right ?
And in general, the GTS430 will become the main card used by my system, and the GTX560 would only be used by octane for rendering purpose ?

PS @larmannjan : I recommand you to look for a 2gb GTX560 as radiance pointed, it's very effective for octane, with a reasonnable price.

[Jaberwocky]

mmmh, this is confusing !
So, to put it clear : if I plug the 2gb GTS430 as my main card, and the 1gb GTX560 as the secondary one, octane will use 2gb ram and the processing power of both cards, right ?
And in general, the GTS430 will become the main card used by my system, and the GTX560 would only be used by octane for rendering purpose ?

PS @larmannjan : I recommand you to look for a 2gb GTX560 as radiance pointed, it's very effective for octane, with a reasonnable price.

No

You can either use both cards for Octane, in which case Octane would use the lowest common demoninator of Ram IE the 1GB in the 560 , but both lots of Cuda cores would be added together and used

or

you can just dedicate one of the cards for rendering and one for just screen display.In which case the card used for rendering would just use it's cuda cores and the memory on that card.

So if for example you decided to use the 430 for rendering it would use all 2mb of ram and the cuda cores on just that card.

[drBouvierLeduc]

Ok, I get it now, thanks for taking the time to clarify.
Btw, that lowest common denominator thing is a pity, is it a cuda or an octane limitation ?

[radiance]

Hi docteur, long time no see

Octane needs to load your scene data into each GPU, each GPU needs to have a copy of the whole scene in video memory,
as GPUs cannot read from other GPU video memory or main system memory at a fast enough rate.

Therefore, any GPUs you include in your rendering configuration become limited to the amount of video memory they have,
making the lowest amount of video ram on all participating cards the maximum during the session.

Hope that makes things a bit more clear.

You can probably render some nice stuff with 1GB if you are clever about building efficient scenes, and with instancing on the horizon for next releases it will become much more useful.

Radiance

[drBouvierLeduc]

Now that's very clear, it seems obvious when it's well explained !...
Looking forward for instancing support (users are always waiting for something more, don't they ?)

[suhail_spa]

and with instancing on the horizon for next releases it will become much more useful.

Radiance

yeah!