Buying a new graphics card for vray-rt

[mahmoud_s12]

Hey

I am building a new Computer for 3d rendering and especially using vray-rt for 3ds max, Lumion, and vray adv

 

my suggested specs until now is as follows:

 

CPU: Intel® Core™ i7-3770K Ivy Bridge 3.5GHz 8MB Cache Desktop Processor

 

Motherboard: ASUS SABERTOOTH Z77 Motherboard

 

RAM: CORSAIR Vengeance 16GB (2 x 8GB) or 32GB (4 x 8GB)??

 

VGA: Galaxy GeForce GTX 680 GC 4GB GDDR5 (this one for vrayrt rendering)

and adding another one for viewport (GTX 650 DirectCU 1GB GDDR5)??

 

is the GTX 680 good for vray-rt?? any experiences??

 

+ future upgrades for another gtx 680

 

CASE:CORSAIR Carbide Series™ 400R Case

 

PSU: XFX ProSeries 650W PSU 80 plus Bronze---is this enough??

 

HD: Western Digital (WD) Caviar Black WD2002FAEX 2TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s HDD or (2 X 1TB WD black)??

 

Monitor: Samsung S23A750D Series 7 23 inch LED 3D Monitor

 

This will cost about 14,000 EGP in Egypt = $2300

I can't afford Quadro GPUs and I can't afford more than this price

so if there's better config for the same price range will be appreciated

[dougjohnston1]

If you are going into v-ray RT are you planing on rendering in CPU or Gpu. For a GPU rendering card nvidia kepler 5000 it just hit the market place first of November this is suppose to be the newest bad boy as far as GPU rendering goes. The CPU side of render totally different kind of cards. I checked out the Kepler card at AU conference some pretty cool stuff.

[mahmoud_s12]

If you are going into v-ray RT are you planing on rendering in CPU or Gpu. For a GPU rendering card nvidia kepler 5000 it just hit the market place first of November this is suppose to be the newest bad boy as far as GPU rendering goes. The CPU side of render totally different kind of cards. I checked out the Kepler card at AU conference some pretty cool stuff.

 

 

I want to render using vray-rt in GPU

kepler 5000 is too expensive for me it's about $1800 I want a GPU that will cost 500-600$

[Dimitris Tolios]

At this moment of time, the verified fastest card for VRay RT GPU is the GTX 580.

This card comes @ 3GB variants and it is within your budget.

The GTX 680 is a tad slower, around 8% slower than a 580 with relatively current drivers.

 

K5000 is still a Kepler based card - thus the K.

Vray in their current RT implementation is not optimized for Kepler based cards like all 6xx GTX nVidias. This might change in the future, but as we sit, the 6xx cards offer advantages other than speed: GTX 670/680s are running cooler and more silent than the 580 (notably so).

Also kepler cards come in 2 and 4GB variants, which might help in some cases as GPU renderings (not rendering speed) of complex scenes is VRam limited. All in all, a GTX 670 4GB is a good all around card, similarly priced to a 3GB 580, consuming less than 2/3 the power, and being about 10% slower. This is what I use personally, and I am happy...BUT...

 

The game changer in the whole situation might be the newer AMD drivers that allow the latest 7950 and 7970 cards to work with VRay RT GPU.

 

In OpenCL benchmarks, 7970s (and almost linearly the 7950) are so much faster than GTX 580s it is not even funny. Took them a few extra months, but latest drivers appear to be working - I don't have actual benchmark times to report from the VRay RT GPU subforum by Chaosgroup's official forum*, but if 7970 and 50s are allowed to stretch their full computational capabilities with VRay RT GPU, I would say those will be the no-brainer choice for both budget and performance driven GPU renderers.

 

 

 

 

50s and 70s alike are 3GB cards, with some special edition 6GB 7970s. Prices (in the US) start right below $300 for the 7950 3GB, and stretch to $600 for the 6GB 7970s.

 

 

If I was buying a GPU for Rendering today on a budget, I would definitely consider AMD above nVidia.

 

* Vlado in the Chaosgroup's RT GPU forum, have a standardized RT GPU scene setup, that users (and Vlado as the official representative) are using to test the rendering times with fixed quality settings between all compatible cards. Unfortunately 79xx scores have not been posted yet.

Edited December 7, 2012 by dtolios

[booskaboo]

I recently picked up a Quadro K5000 and it's giving great results. The ideal would be to use a high end Quadro for display and Kepler card(s) for computation.

 

But one thing to keep in mind with any card you use for GPU rendering is to continually monitor the heat. I use RealTemp and have it open whenever I'm doing an RT render. Depending on the complexity of your shaders and lighting, the card can get quite hot.

[dougjohnston1]

If you render in production CPU with the k 5000 they are smoking fast on render. We had quadro 4000 and it has different architecture they will not work together per nvidia. We are putting three k5000 cards in machine. One for the view port and two for rendering in GPU but when rendering in production all three cards will be going towards CPU.

[booskaboo]

Doug- So the K5000 increases performance in CPU renders as well? I've only ever used the CUDA setting in RT...

[dougjohnston1]

Yes, they increase the performance in CPU. The cards I thought where only for GPU. When I rendered in production CPU it is crazy how fast the cards are on time. I have seen a render that took 8hrs with the quadro 4000 took 1.5 hrs on the k5000 with the same settings. I am putting the third k5000 card in today just got it in the mail. I will report back on performance. I would try it out in production CPU to see if you get the same results. If you get the the same results please let me know. I understand the cards are for GPU and Vray RT but the other day I wanted to see performance on the production Cpu side and was blown away on the performance and speed of the two k 5000 cards. We where having big issues with the quadro 4000 card and two k5000 cards it would not work right. I then pulled quadro 4000 out of machine per nvida and then I only had two k 5000 everyone Sade it would not work that you have to have primary card for view port. They where wrong, so I then started testing everything on RT GPU and production CPU I also tested profrmanece on Autocad architecture 2012 BIM model that was a very large architectural building and the performance in the view ports where unreal I have never seen anything like it. The cards due cost a lot of money but it is will worth it for our company's workflow...Everyone wants to talk about how much money they cost and you can buy cheaper cards that will perform better what ever keep thinking that!! Times are changing and technology is moving fast!!

[norbpetr]

Dimitris, it may be the case that AMD drivers are fine.

 

Vray RT might be using some nvidia specific opencl extensions, so it's natural HD 7970 will have issues.

Source: http://devgurus.amd.com/thread/159758

 

Please notice that, as far as I know, all general purpose OpenCL benchmarks are fine with HD 7970. Personally, I think vray developers don't want amd to be supported at the moment and opencl extensions might be proprietary as well.

 

 

Norbert

[cadviz]

http://www.chaosgroup.com/forums/vbulletin/showthread.php?52415-GPU-benchmarks&highlight=gpu+rendering