Hi, Everyone!

Hope you all are about ready for the yearly holiday madness. We have children coming from all over the States, so things should be interesting.

I am working on getting to know Cycles. I have a NVIDIA GForce 8600 video card, so it should be no problem for Cycles and renedering capabilities. However, when I go into User Preferences to set it up, Blender 2.69 is not "seeing" the card and consequently I am forced to use the CPU video card to render with. The checkbox for GPU/CUDA is not there. This ain't good. I checked in the NVIDIA control panel to see if blender is listed in program settings, and it shows it is. Stil, no joy on getting it to work w/ 2.69. Surely, I am overlooking some small thing. I bought the card to work with Poser, and it was a big improvement over the stock card. The computer is running Win XP Service Pack 3 and the CPU is a Intel Duo E7400 @ 2.80 ghz running 4 GB of RAM. Anyone familiar with this that can help a tired old man out? Any help much appreciated.

TIA

C~

hate to say this but I think your card is too old now for cycles

is a lot of threads on BA about gpu's so might be worth you looking at them

but I think you need at least a gtx now

Here is base info from the Blender Manual

NVidia CUDA is supported for GPU rendering with NVidia graphics cards. We support graphics cards starting from GTX 4xx (computing capability 2.0). Computing capability 1.x cards are no longer supported, but you may still be able to compile experimental builds with a limited feature set (see below).

Cycles requires recent drivers to be installed, on all operating systems. Be sure to download the Blender version matching your operating system; that is, download 64-bit Blender for 64-bit operating systems.

You can see a list of supported cards here

I know I have a decent NVidia card but it only has computing capability of 1 and you need a mini of 2 I been watching there are numerous cards on Newegg on sale for the holiday and just waiting a bit more to invest in a new card

Hope this helps

@heddheld & @Lobo3433 - Thanks for the feedback. It appears my vid card just won't cut it w/ Cycles. Good to know. I have had it for 7 or 8 years and recently swapped it into my main CPU from an older model. Looks to me I am needing to look for a new card. A quick look on Newegg tells me I am going to have to save up a few pennies to be able to afford one. Prices are pretty high!

Thanks, guys!

C~

read lots of reviews BEFORE you buy

check out the cycles render speed test on BA

fingers crossed you get the best card at the right price ;-)

Agree with heddheld

read allot of reviews I was looking at one mainly because it was backward compatiable with my PCI Express these are my two that I have narrowed it down toleaning towards the MSI one but saving pennies first

MSI N650-MD1GD5/OC GeForce GTX 650 1GB 128-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 x16 HDCP Ready Video Card
or
ASUS GTX650TI-O-1GD5 GeForce GTX 650 Ti 1GB 128-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 x16 HDCP Ready Video Card

personaly I'd go for the Asus ;-)

as a tip look for more ram ! 1 Tb will limit what you do

mines only a 560 with 2 Tb and I have had it choke on bigger scenes

(posers textures can be too big sometimes)

There was one with 2 gig of memoery but due to my motherboard being PCI 2 there not many GTX that would be in my price range that were backward compatiable unless I changed MB as well and that is a project that for the moment is on hold regretfully

Quote - personaly I'd go for the Asus ;-)

as a tip look for more ram ! 1 Tb will limit what you do

mines only a 560 with 2 Tb and I have had it choke on bigger scenes

(posers textures can be too big sometimes)

Hedd has his finger on the pulse, regarding VRAM: that is going to be the major deciding factor in how your card supports Blender Cycles performance. Prices should be coming down for older cards: you might be able to get a decent deal on ebay... I did, even 'way out here in Oz. :biggrin:

I will have to browse and keep my eyes open at price drops especially after the holidays. thanks for the additional information