Indigo Renderer Forum

Hello.
There is Tesla c1060 for 420$.
I need an advice. Do you think that this GPU is worth buying?
I usually work in 3ds max 2011 with various render engines (Vray, indigo, trying to manage octane), Adobe CS6 photoshop, indesign, premiere and after effects.

Thanks in advance
Mateusz

Hey bahamut,

no GPU expert here but: The price seems really good, but isn't the C1060 a little outdated already? I know Tesla has some stuff that consumer products don't, but plain performance-wise my gtx 560ti, which costs a little more than half, outperforms it with double and single precision (not even sure which one counts for CUDA/Indigo ).
also for using it with indigo your GPU performance heavily depends on your processing power: I render with an overclocked i7 2600k @ 4.4GHz, and my GPU is rarely used at 100% by indigo. So if you have a considerably higher processing power or plan to have it in the future, a more powerful GPU really makes sense. Otherwise you could save some bucks or better spent some money on a slave with an i7 and a nowadays GTX.

Just my 2 cents...

I have I5 2500k OCed to 4,5Ghz.
For me indigo takes all the CPU and GPU while rendering.
Right now i have GF 460 1,5 GB and it's ok.
I thought this Tesla willbe faster than this.

But if there is a cheaper and faster choice i'll consider it.

I'd suggest something like a GeForce GTX 560 Ti, that seems to still be the optimal performance/price GPU to get for heavy compute applications (the newer 600 series is more games-oriented).

As Polinalkrimizei pointed out however, upgrading the CPU to an i7 would probably be the first priority.

Does it really metter if you have HT option in your CPU since you are using it's full power anyway?

HyperThreading is indeed a great feature, you get a lot more performance for just a little extra power usage.

Thanks for advices.
I think i'll buy 560 Ti if there will be one in decent price.

As for CPU. I think haswell will have something interesting

While on this topic: is there any specific advantage in using NVidia GPUs?
Like Indigo for CUDA being more optimized than OpenCL?

Otherwise I was thinking to get a good AMD card like a Radeon HD 7970, since several tests have shown them to be faster than NVidia's direct competitors, in OpenCL based computational tasks.

I'm also going to buy a new graphic card specifically for Indigo.

So I have a question: is there any specific advantage in the CUDA implementation and optimization over OpenCL?

Basically, are high end AMD/ATI graphics cards a viable option, or do we need NVidia because of CUDA?
Thanks,

CUDA on NVIDIA cards is just a tiny little faster the OpenCL on NVIDIA cards... not realy a benefit!
But ATIs 7xxx cards are way faster in GPU computing then NVIDAs 6xx line, so I'll go for a 7950 soon too
(GIGABYTE GV-R795WF3-3GD WindForce 3X)

I have radeon hd 5850 (1gb) at home and a geforce gtx 560 ti (1gb) at work.
Also had different cards here at home for testing like gtx 275 (1gb), gtx 570 (2.56 gb) and Radeon 6970 (2gb).
I realised it is nearly no difference for rendering in indigo between the cards that I tested.
(My CPU is Xeon E3 1230v2 with 3,3 Ghz and 8 threads.)

What I found is that the viewport performance in openGl mode is much faster in Blender with a my AMD Card and VOBs enabled than with any Geforce Card.
Nevertheless I ordered a Geforce 660 ti with 3gb vram for my workstation at home. I plan to use my hd 5850 for the viewport and the 660 ti for rendering and for my experience the performace in Indigo will not change much.

But when I want use an other GPU accelerated render engine like Octane or Blender cycles there is no way around a nvidia card because this engines only support CUDA. So that is the best solution for me.

When I have tested the gtx 660Ti will post my impression here.
I think it would be a good thing if indigo offers a benchmark like luxmark for luxrender or benchwell for maxwell render. It could be named IndiMark, Benchigo, IndiBench or something like that.

Now I did some tests with my GPUs:

I rendered the caterpillar testscene for 3min:

Radeon HD 5850

SPP : 268,18
GPU Load: ~60%

Geforce GTX 560Ti

SPP : 299
GPU Load: ~40%

Geforce GTX 660 Ti

SPP : 316
GPU Load: ~30%

I would like to see the result of a Radeon HD 7950 or 7970.

Nice, thanks for this tests vasco!!

To me it proves that the GTX 560 Ti still kicks ass price/performance-wise! Now I can sleep better, knowing I don't really need a new GPU.

Yes the 560Ti is still a good GPU, but I made the experience that 1GB vram is not very much when you want to render a big scene.
Also the 560Ti with 2GB has nearly the same price than the 660Ti with 2GB. For this reason I bought a 660Ti with 3GB. I will not get out of memory so fast.

vasco wrote:Now I did some tests with my GPUs:

I rendered the caterpillar testscene for 3min:

Radeon HD 5850

SPP : 268,18
GPU Load: ~60%

Geforce GTX 560Ti

SPP : 299
GPU Load: ~40%

Geforce GTX 660 Ti

SPP : 316
GPU Load: ~30%

I would like to see the result of a Radeon HD 7950 or 7970.

i have both in the same board,
caterpilar 3m gtx680 cuda - 419.38spp - drivers 306.97.
caterpilar 3m hd7970 opencl1.2 - 421.33spp - drivers 12.10.

no overclock.

compared to a t8200 cpu, this are rockets.