GTX 780 and GTX 980 Ti, Together?

Nyghtfall3D

This morning, I ordered a new EVGA 6 GB GTX 980 Ti, to replace my EVGA 6 GB GTX 780.  Someone on another board I frequent suggested using them together, to add more than 5000 CUDA cores to my Iray renders.

Is that possible?

Kharma

I was under the impression that the cuda cores on cards could not be combined, or is it just the amount of memory that can't combine?

Richard Haseltine

It's just memory that won't combine, two (or more) cards can work on a render together. It does, however, depend on your motherboard (and power supply) but assuming those are suitable then yes you can have both installed - if you don't need the 980 for games or the like then leave the 780 as your display adapter and use the 980 as a render-only device.

Nyghtfall3D

That will be awesome!

Thanks!

nicstt

You might need to update drivers, but as already said, will work fine if PSU and MB can cope. Don't SLI.

Nyghtfall3D

nicstt said:

You might need to update drivers, but as already said, will work fine if PSU and MB can cope.

I future-proofed my PC with a 1000W PSU.  My MB is an ASUS Z87-Pro, and supports four GPUs.

nicstt said:

Don't SLI.

Right.

hjake

So does this mean if you have GTX 980Ti and GTX 970 in the same box (no SLI), you could be rendering with DS iRay on the 980Ti while you work in another program with the 970 as your display, for example Poser 2014?

WendyLuvsCatz

hjake said:

So does this mean if you have GTX 980Ti and GTX 970 in the same box (no SLI), you could be rendering with DS iRay on the 980Ti while you work in another program with the 970 as your display, for example Poser 2014?

Yes it can but I got more issues than it is worth using my 760 on my monitors and 980ti for renders, esp not getting nvidia control panel to come up and not being able to use the 980ti on iclone where I really need it.

I still have both in box but put all on the 980ti now, the 760 is handy for the silly times I render in Octane in Carrara or DS4.7 at the same time as iray in DAZ studio 4.9

 I stick one on one card and the other on the other ticking the one it fits, yes one scene must be below 2 GB, Octane tells me

you can only use all the memory of the smallest card if you use both so if over 2GBlike in my case or whatever your 780 is disable the lesser card

smaller scenes add the second one for a boost

think of it as a turbo boost or overdrive, left disabled mostly but there to tick if you can use it

AnotherUserName

Nyghtfall said:

That will be awesome!

Thanks!

Nice! I plan to hook up a 980Ti to my 770 in the near future.

hjake

JaguarElla said:

hjake said:

So does this mean if you have GTX 980Ti and GTX 970 in the same box (no SLI), you could be rendering with DS iRay on the 980Ti while you work in another program with the 970 as your display, for example Poser 2014?

Yes it can but I got more issues than it is worth using my 760 on my monitors and 980ti for renders, esp not getting nvidia control panel to come up and not being able to use the 980ti on iclone where I really need it.

I still have both in box but put all on the 980ti now, the 760 is handy for the silly times I render in Octane in Carrara or DS4.7 at the same time as iray in DAZ studio 4.9

 I stick one on one card and the other on the other ticking the one it fits, yes one scene must be below 2 GB, Octane tells me

you can only use all the memory of the smallest card if you use both so if over 2GBlike in my case or whatever your 780 is disable the lesser card

smaller scenes add the second one for a boost

think of it as a turbo boost or overdrive, left disabled mostly but there to tick if you can use it

Thanks, so for me it would be better to just build a 980Ti (6GB) machine to render and use my "old" machine for modelling with 970 (3.5GB+0.5GB).

This raises another question if my Old Machine is a i7-4790K with 32GB RAM and GTX 970 which I use for modelling and I plan to use a custom built system with a GTX 980Ti system to render then what is the least expensive Intel processor/ram combo I can get away with and still use the 970 machine at max capacity for creating the project?

This new 980Ti machine's other task is to play 3840x2160 latest game titles when not GPU rendering. Usually game titles are not as processor/ram dependant as 3D rendering.

 

 

 

 

JCThomas

Your 4790k machine is still great...just sell the 970 and replace it with a 980ti. With the money youd save from the rest of the second system you could put in a second ti. A dedicated modeler and a dedicated renderer seem unnecessary.

WendyLuvsCatz

There is something I saw on the iClone forum that adds cuda cores without actual VRAM memory but nobody seems to know if it works with 3D rendering or our programs, probably not.

Nvidia Tesla

hjake

thanks for the suggests :-) anyone else have any suggestions how to get the most power to create and render?

JCThomas

fool said:

There is something I saw on the iClone forum that adds cuda cores without actual VRAM memory but nobody seems to know if it works with 3D rendering or our programs, probably not.

Nvidia Tesla

While I admit I don't have experience with Tesla cards, there is no reason they shouldn't work in IRay. They should just show up as another device to check off in the settings. They do work in Octane, judging by their occassional appearance in the benchmark results table:

https://render.otoy.com/octanebench/results.php

(Note: at the time of this post, a lot of results appear to be missing from the table. I recall several systems with 8 or 9 980 tis or 6 Titan Zs at the top of the chart, but these are missing at the moment. Those systems would have been set up as network renderers, by the way, so two or more systems...My own results is missing. Might have something to do with Octane 3.0 coming out or perhaps the benchmark tool was recompiled with Octane 3.0 API)

Anyway, the Tesla cards are the worst cost/performance choice by far. They don't have any outputs, so you can't connect a monitor to them, and they cost several thousand dollars.

JCThomas

hjake said:

thanks for the suggests :-) anyone else have any suggestions how to get the most power to create and render?

You can check this thread I started about a week ago:

http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/68899/building-intel-rigs-for-iray/p1

Nine different builds in there at three different price points. If I was personally building a new rig, I'd go with the high-end X99 build in that thread.

sfaa69

nicstt said:

You might need to update drivers, but as already said, will work fine if PSU and MB can cope. Don't SLI.

My understanding is that SLI only pertains to cards with the same GPU, Is that wrong?

JCThomas

sfaa69 said:

nicstt said:

You might need to update drivers, but as already said, will work fine if PSU and MB can cope. Don't SLI.

My understanding is that SLI only pertains to cards with the same GPU, Is that wrong?

No, that is not wrong.

hjake

JCThomas said:

hjake said:

thanks for the suggests :-) anyone else have any suggestions how to get the most power to create and render?

You can check this thread I started about a week ago:

http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/68899/building-intel-rigs-for-iray/p1

Nine different builds in there at three different price points. If I was personally building a new rig, I'd go with the high-end X99 build in that thread.

Thanks JC. Cheers.