Okay - loving iray but hating running it in software mode and it taking forever to create my pics - so it's time to look into graphics cards.

Sadly, being on a budget, about the most I can stretch to is something called the Gigabyte GeForce GTX 750 Ti OC 4GB GDDR5 PCIe3.0 WINDFORCE 2X.

Can anyone advise me, will this card be enough to get my rendering times down from overnight to an hour or two?

If not, is there anything else I should be looking at?

My budget is about 100GBP or so.

FWIW: my motherboard is Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd. F2A68HM-HD2, my processor is 3.90 gigahertz AMD A6-6400K APU with Radeon HD Graphics, I've 16GIG of Ram, and it runs under Windows 7 64 bit.

Thanks xxx

Can you kick the RAM up to 32 gig, which Radeon and how much memory on it??

Hey! Thanks for the response!

I'd not thought of upping the RAM - I didn't realise that would help

According to Belarc Advisor, I think the graphics card is part of the motherboard, so the only way to boost that is an external card

That said - I took advantage of the sale here at the moment and bought Reality for Daz Studio, so more RAM rather than a new graphics card might be how I go forward now...

RAM will affect render speed only if your current renders are getting swapped to disc - in which case no GPU is likely to help.

I have just bought myself the same card and while I haven't had much chance to push it it seems substantially faster (probably 2 to 4 times faster) than pure CPU, an i7 920, so as long as your scenes fit into 4GB it may well be worth adding. Of course if your scenes need more than 4GB of RAM (minus any used by the system) then the GPU won't help anyway.

ldgilman posted at 6:16PM Wed, 17 February 2016 - #4255322

Can you kick the RAM up to 32 gig, which Radeon and how much memory on it??

With Iray you don't want a Radeon, for GPU accelerated it's Nvidia only. Which Radeon card doesn't really matter.

That card will be an improvement over any CPU :) I think , but if you can afford a slightly more expensive one, you should consider a GT 960 with 4 Gb, it will render almost 2 times faster than the 750, because it has almost 2 times more Cuda cores (1024 vs 640). It's the amount of Cuda cores that make the difference on render times, so the price difference should be worth it.

I am looking at a Dell XPS 8900 with GeForce GTX 960 2GB DDR5, Tb hd and 256 ssd, but only 24gb ram. It is much more than I want to pay, so I need to be sure it is up to the job. Anyone got thoughts, please?

24 Gb of ram is OK, but you will be very limited by the GPU : 2 Gb of vram only allow very small scenes to be rendered (1 figure and one background scene prop, more or less), it's recommended to have 4 Gb vram. When the scene doesn't fit on vram, you have to render with cpu, which is... very long, compared to the GPU.

Pougette, GIGABYTE GV-N75TWF2OC-4GI, and the ASUS STRIX-GTX750TI-DC2OC-4GD5 are the goto cards for iray budgets buyers right now. They are the only 4gb Nvdia 750 out there for now. It is a powerhungry beast with 2 fans and needs a 6pin power in so make sure you have one or buy an adapter if it does not come with card. The first thing to do is download gpu z and make sure you have a 4gb card because some sellers are selling their 2gb cards and calling them 4gb total with ram share which will not work with Nvidia Iray. You can only render with the ram on the card physically. You can add cards later but the card with the lowest amount of ram will determine how much you can use for Iray. Video ram in Iray is not cumulative. So this means that two 4gb cards does not equal to 8gb of video ram for your render it just means you only have 4gb's to work with whole but the extra card adds to cuda core count so adding an extra 1000 cuda card just makes renders faster but it does not give you more room to work with. This is a great card for Iray budget hope this helps.

I also bought the Gigabyte 750Ti 4GB. Out of the box, it's the same speed as, or slightly slower, than my old 550ti it replaces. ...but its designed to be overclocked, just download the OC Guru software from Gigabyte.

SilverDolphin posted at 3:45PM Thu, 25 February 2016 - #4257379

... the card with the lowest amount of ram will determine how much you can use for Iray...

Cards can drop put individually, so if you have a 2GB and a 4GB card scenes that fit in 2GB will sue both and scenes that need more than 2GB up to 4GB will use only the 4GB card.

prixat posted at 2:55PM Thu, 25 February 2016 - #4257394

I also bought the Gigabyte 750Ti 4GB. Out of the box, it's the same speed as, or slightly slower, than my old 550ti it replaces. ...but its designed to be overclocked, just download the OC Guru software from Gigabyte.

Factory Overclock is fine, overclocking a card to be higher speed than it is out of the box is not recommended. Rendering puts a whole new level of stress on a video card. (Just like it does to CPU's.)

It can make cards unstable and cause crashes. It will also, likely, shorten the life of your card.

I don't know how to overclock, but in any event it sounds unwise - like constantly driving in the wrong gear. It may work, but it ain't sensible.