Upgrade time? Is GPU acceleration mature enough?

[debido666]

Exports to sketchup.

Specs for 2 servers:

CPU: 4 X AMD Opteron 4180 6-Core 2.6GHz (24cores total)
Memory: 8 gig, each system. (DDR3 1333 ECC Unbuffered) (max. UDIMM-32Gig, RDIMM-128Gig@1600)
Motherboard: PCI-E Gen. 2 slots (ASUS KCMA-D8)

What card should I go with, say 2 to 3 times faster rendering? ATI or nVidia? Thinking FireGL or Quadro (because of the drivers).

[Zom-B]

Regarding GPU rendering it is the question if the CPUs are fast enough to feed the GPUs fast enough so they have no idle cycles. it would be very interesting to know if in such a 4 CPU system the raw CPU power is connected to the GPU well and can benefit!?

If these 4 CPUs can feed a Graphic-card without any (architectural) issues I would go for some new Cards that AMD and Nvidia are releasing "soon"...

Regarding FireGL and Quadro you can easily ignore them sinc ethe (driver based) benefit they have over other cards is in OpenGL rendering (so your 3D app viewport benefits here!).

[Polinalkrimizei]

This won't help much, but these are my numbers:

For a Intel i7 2600k @ 3.4Ghz (8 threads) a GeForce 560Ti as a GPU is more than enough, depending on the scene I'am able to use merely 30-40% of its capacity. It is a nice speedboost though, but not easily expressed with numbers, as the samples per pixel don't seem 100% comparable (in some scenes, I get a HUUUUGE boost when using CPU+GPU instead of CPU only, in others "just" 30%... will post exact numbers when I am at home tonight).

BUT when I run the i72600 @4.4Ghz, I can use up to 98% of my GPU's capacity (an average of perhaps >90% for most scenes).

Now search for a bechmark for your CPU's against mine, if you are twice as fast as I am, a GTX 580 is the minimun you should try. But your Opterons will be much faster together for sure

So like Zom-B said: Youl'll need something in the very High-End range, perhaps even two consumer cards packed together (SLI, like the GTX 590). It's probably best to wait for the next generation to help your CPUs crunching some numbers.

@devs: Does Indigo support SLI?

[Zom-B]

For a Intel i7 2600k @ 3.4Ghz (8 threads) a GeForce 560Ti as a GPU is more than enough, depending on the scene I'am able to use merely 30-40% of its capacity. It is a nice speedboost though, but not easily expressed with numbers, as the samples per pixel don't seem 100% comparable (in some scenes, I get a HUUUUGE boost when using CPU+GPU instead of CPU only, in others "just" 30%... will post exact numbers when I am at home tonight).
BUT when I run the i72600 @4.4Ghz, I can use up to 98% of my GPU's capacity (an average of perhaps >90% for most scenes).

Maybe at some point optimizations from the devs. are possible to enhance the connection between CPU & GPU so a "weak" CPU still could feed a powerful GPU better...

@devs: Does Indigo support SLI?

At the moment only 1 GPU is supported, also on a 2 GPU card!