For you Blender Artists, Kepler cards....yeah or nay?

[AbnRanger]

I tried to do some googling to find out if the Blender Cycles Render engine is working better with Kepler cards or is it still about even, with the previous Fermi models. But no joy. Anyone know if NVidia has helped make up for the crippled Compute capability, through driver updates? On their website, they are showing the 680 and 670 as having a level of 3 Computing capacity, compared to 2 of the 570/580. So, I'm pretty confused. I would think someone like Michalis or Digman might have heard something about this over in the Blender community.

I'm thinking about upgrading to a 670 4GB, and I think it's the VRAM that will make the difference, in both Blender and 3D Coat. I currently have a GTX 470, but it only has 1.28 GB of VRAM. I'm thinking Cycles will like the extra RAM, as well as 3D Coat, in the Paint Room....when working with 4k+ maps and large brush sizes. Was trying to hold out until the GTX 700 series, but it looks like that will be delayed til nearly this time next year.

[michalis]

Abn,

this is a good question.

I wonder though, a good GPU, and a good CPU stand for many apps, not just for blender.

Have in mind, the new implementations in cycles, as fibers-hair, new cycles SSS, some experimental volume shaders, these all are running under CPU only.

OK, it's a matter of time to run under GPU, I guess so.

Still, complicated scenes, using lot of textures, maybe lot of poly faces, may not manage to run under GPU. 2 or 4 GB or VRAM may not be enough. What will happen if displacements start asking for subdivisions, you can't say.

The big boys on the other hand, insist to run under CPU only (render farms)

Funny, after seeing all this development, I decided to upgrade my previous old nVidia to a good (second hand) ATI.

Indeed not cycles cuda rendering but what a performance under OGL. Cycles sculpting and 3dcoat work just great.

I depend on my CPUs (dual xeon 16 threads) and the 24 GB or RAM.

A three years old (at 2.4 Ghz!!) setup that renders complicated scenes maintaining ~2/3 of the best cuda 570-580 GPUs.

So, I wonder. Such CPUs may be expensive but they stand for any app and they can render any scene.

For some reason, xeons run surprisingly faster than i7 under renderers like cycles.

Then comes the heat you know. Xeons are running cool.

Even under a greek hot summer ( >104F). Imagine what temp we'll face in a CUDA GPU after a few hours of rendering.

These Xeons stay bellow 131 F after 5 hours full thread rendering. (under this horrible greek summer, avoiding air conditioning - I hate it)

We're talking about animation rendering, right?

Because on static scenes - viewport real time rendering, powerful CPUs are still your best choice for many reasons.

Then comes the OSL. Great stuff but runs under CPU only.

What I mean Abn, not the right time to buy a GPU for cycles only.

Buy a good - modern GPU anyway, for all your apps.