marciz posted at 11:33PM Fri, 09 June 2017 - #4307174

All very helpful, folks! I'm not tech savvy when it comes to video cards; the specs seem daunting to understand. The machine has an NVidia GeForce GT620 as a video card--and I'm not actually sure it IS on the motherboard. (But I think it likely.) So, I'm pretty much a newbie when it comes to video cards. But I'd done a little research and that said that a desktop card rather than a gaming card would be better for 3D rendering--thought it did say the desktop cards are pricey.
Looks like what you've given me so far is a very good start!

I certainly understand the tech talk and numbers can be confusing and misleading, no worries. However, if by desktop card you mean a workstation level graphics card like the Nvidia Quadro, then that information you read was probably referring to on-screen display rendering such as would be necessary for a professional CAD artist or engineer. In the case of high-end workstations that require screen redraws of very complex geometric shapes and scenes, the Quadro cards are usually recommended. However, in the case of GPU-enhanced renderings like that found in Blender Cycles or Octane Render engines, a gaming level card is just as effective or in some cases even faster than a workstation Quadro card which costs thousands of dollars more. One would wonder how that is possible. The answer once again is in the number of cores the card has. Without getting too involved in comparisons, suffice to say that most gaming cards, like the GTX line, contain more cores for polygon throughput than the much more expensive workstation cards do. Most GPU render engines like the ones we are using to render polygonal 3d scenes are using the graphics card's CUDA or OpenCL cores to push the speed of the render. Workstation cards contain features like more onboard Vram (memory) which allow them to perform different tasks and hold much more information at one time than a gaming card, but they do not require a large number of cores on the card. So rendering in Cycles using a $4000 Quadro card would be slower than rendering the same scene using a $1000 Titan X gaming card. This is because the Titan X card has more active rendering cores with higher clock speeds than the higher priced, powerful Quadro card.

Also, you wouldn't really find a workstation level Quadro which had a high core count in the price range you specified. You can, however, find a gaming level GTX card with a large number of rendering cores for that price. I hope that clears things up a little.

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