Second Graphics Card question.

[jfharper]

Can I drop any second card in for using vray rt to help speed that up, or does it have to match my existing card exactly.

[mi75]

Any will be fine. One card can run the display and the other used for RT or both for RT but that will slow the display response significantly.

[Francisco Penaloza]

Just to know, if you have a Quadro card and you add a gtx or AMD, you may experience some quirks when using Premiere and some other Adobe software.

[jfharper]

...but that will slow the display response significantly.

Thanks. Are you saying the display response will slow more than it already is? Because it is not very slow with one card.

[Francisco Penaloza]

No it won't, depending of the GPU rendering you use, you can control how much GPU you can use.

[jfharper]

ok, thanks. so any card is ok. I currently have a evga gtx 970, which I really like and works fine for what I do. BTW, do I plug the monitors (2) into the 970, and card #2 when installed will automatically add to the speed to vrayrt eventhough it is not connected to a monitor? So rt will use both cards, eventhough the monitors are only hooked up to one card? Also, can you recommend a second card maybe in the $200-$300 range?

[Dimitris Tolios]

You should not have issues adding a second GTX that doesn't match your current one, headless (i.e. no monitor connected), or not. It is better to have one or more headless cards in your GPU rendering system to make it possible to have a fluid viewport if you choose to leave your viewport GPU free of other tasks.

 

That said, windows will recognize the new card effectively from the 1st boot, but that doesn't mean VRay RT will immediately start using it: you will have to go to the Vray RT settings in your application, or go to Start Menu > Programs > Chaos Group > V-Ray RT Adv for 3ds Max > Select OpenCL devices for V-Ray RT.

 

https://docs.chaosgroup.com/display/VRAY3MAX/Set+Up+V-Ray+RT+GPU

 

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For $200~300 you could go after a used 970 or a GTX 1060. The latter would probably be my choice as it has 6GB VRam and might be able to pull more complicated scenes for you. It is also faster, so I would probably end up using the 1060 as my main GPU and the current 970 as the "accelerator only" card. If you can go slightly north of $300, there are deals on used 980Ti cards that the 1070 threw out of favor.