JVRenderer posted at 11:42PM Tue, 23 February 2016 - #4256813

If you have about $400 to $500 to spare you can upgrade to a decent nVidia Video Card and Power Supply A GTX970 with 4GB is about $350, this is a mid end card with 1600 cudas, Unless you have a decent Powersupply you ,may need to fork out another $150 for a platinum 80 certified, 850W power supply

The performance is significant. That configuration is nowhere near pro. My dream rig is $3500 (two Titan Xs with 12 Gb each) which should be about 3 times faster than my current rig

I don't render in Superfly yet, but I've been rendering in Octane. I've tried Reality and Iray with CPU render option switch on... It was no way near the speed of GPU renders.

You can't really compare apple with oranges. If you have a lower end nVidia card with only a few hundred CUDAs it will not give you the speed you expected. The GTX970 has 1600 cudas. the Titan X 3300 cudas. I have two older GTX760's they each have 1100 cudas so combined 2200 cudas.

As with CPU,rendering if you have an older single or dual threads CPU with lower speed it won't give you fast results. You probably have to invest in a ,multi threads / multi core CPU to get the result similar to a Mid end Video Card. Or you could build a renderfarm with multiple computers. Of course, there is a matter of cost.

So, no mater how you slice it...whether GPU or CPU rendering, If you want speed, you gotta pay.

Hi there

For GTX 970 I would say 650W PSU is enough and 550W will be OK,those GPU doesn't eat too much power like Titan Z or Titan X,I'm running Titan X with GTX780,both are Overclocked plus I'm running older Xeon X5670 which is OC to 4.2GHz and my PSU is 850W,Titan X usually eats around 250W when renders and GTX780 eats around the same as Titan X 250W

GTX970 is great card,but have slower 0.5GB VRAM which can affect render speeds,just have look over on Blender forums and regarding Titan X there,if you are really want to render only with Superlfy,I wouldn't get Titan X,its great card with lots of VRAM,but 980Ti is slightly slower than Titan X in Superlfy and my old GTX780 still have reasonable render times,slightly slower than Titan X,as I pointed in one thread over on RDNA I think Superfly is not optimized for new Maxwell cards and due this I would go with older GTX780 6GB which cost lot less than Titan X and same has been with Octane when Octane performed poorly with Maxwell cards(Titan X,GTX980 etc),but at least Otoy optimized the renderer for new cards...

If you are using for rendering GPU then I would invest,but still I would bit wait until new Pascal and Polaris will be out and plus Octane 3 will have in future OpenCL and then you can go route of the AMD card

If you render with Octane then I would probably go with Titan X,but still if its worth hard to say,price is still too high for Titan X

Hope this helps

Thanks,Jura