rezk

Here is a video from BOXX Technologies comparing RT performances of the GTX 780 and TITAN to the Tesla K20; this might be of some help to you: Personally, I think that most quadro cards (save for the ultra-high-end stuff) would be excellent for viewport performance only and not much good for GPU rendering. For that you'll want the higher number of CUDA cores and high GPU base clocks that you'd find in a Tesla K20/K40 card or a high-end gaming GTX card such as the 780, 780Ti or TITAN. I have even seen videos where people combine a Quadro (for viewports) with a GTX (for CUDA) in workstation builds, but I'm not sure how well that would work for certain specific applications. Hope this helps and good luck.

Hi Dmitry, I can understand your reluctance to switch over to a GPU pipeline, but from what I've seen so far, V-Ray 3.0 should come with render element support from GPU renders - so maybe it will finally be an acceptable alternative to traditional CPU workflows in terms of flexibility... Anyway, you can always invest in a decent hardware configuration with a relatively low-end graphics card for now and then upgrade (or add more GPUs) later should you feel that your workload demands change. For around US$1,500 I would personally recommend something like an Intel i7 4770k with a decent CLC (e.g. Corsair H100i), a decent motherboard (e.g. Asus Z87WS), around 16GB of memory, an SSD and a storage drive, and a GeForce GTX 760 (which should be more than enough for viewport performance as well as GPU rendering on small to mid-sized scenes). All of this should fit nicely into your budget of $1,000 to $1,500 including case, fans, power supply, etc. with maybe even some cash to spare for new peripherals... Hope this helps and good luck with your system build.

I'm no expert, but looking at your processor/mem spec, I suggest you hold out for a better card, maybe a GTX 760 or better... Even though this all depends on what kind level of detail you get into with your architectural work, you'd be hard pressed to get much performance in 3dsmax with a GT 630 (which is not to say it wouldn't work, I'm sure it would) but if you get a good Kepler based GPU with a decent number of CUDA cores, you'd get excellent performance in VrayRT as well as the 3dsmax viewport. For now, your old GeForce 8500GT could work too but I'm not sure how long you'd be able to stand the performance bottleneck. I think a second hand GTX560Ti might also be an option you could explore for the time being. Hope this helps, good luck.