OTOY Forums

I am thinking about purchasing the full version of Octane but I need to upgrade my graphics card first. While I have read a number of forums discussing which card is the best in terms of price vs. performance, I continue to read comments about the importance of having a card with over 1GB of ram for processing large scenes. My question is this, how large is large?

I work primarily in Arch Viz, and the models I use are rarely over 50MB themselves. But not having too much experience with Octane, I don't have a good understanding of how much materials, lighting, and all the other fun stuff you can do in Octane add to the overall size of the files. While I am leaning towards getting a card with at least 1.5GB of memory, I do not want to be hindered in the future if I ever decide to add an extra card.

Does anyone have an example of a scene that was too large for a card with 1.5GB of space?

Thanks

2 gig is about as big as you can go at present. The new 590 card has 3 gig but that is shared over 2 processors so they only get 1.5 gig each.

It is not only the polygon count what matters. If you have large textures then it could blow up your scene because Octane will uncompress them.
If you optimize your scene then you should be fine with 1 or 1.5 Gig but it depends on your data. Highly detailed medical scans for examples require more RAM of course.
Just try it out first and then decide. The GTX 460 2GB has a very good price for the value.

The first GTX-580´s with 3 Gb memory are out. F.i. Point of view makes two versions. Mildly and heavily overclocked. Would never overclock to the extreme. About 500E.

Is it correct that 3Gb is the maximum per GPU for Octane?

As far as I am aware, Octane can render to whatever memory your card has. I've not read of any upper limit.

The new 580's with 3GB are the best cards currently for octane use, and use can use the full 3GB for octane,
we have one in the office, it's a great card.

Radiance