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670 or 770 for 3D work?

PaulW

PaulW

PaulW

Associate
Joined
6 Jun 2005
Posts
870
Location
Plymouth / Cambridge
this is my last upgrade of my current rig before i start saving for a brand new Haswell Maxwell / Volta machine in a about 1.5 - 2 years time.

curently have a GTX 295 which has been a bit of a silly card but has lasted me for a good while. unlike many here i'm more looking for a card for 3D work / PS as well as the odd game and video edit. so for me having a Titan is a complete waste of money. first of the 295 was an SLI nightmare as most things like 3DsMax do not take advantage of it and always had problem with the card droping out now and again. which sucks. so im looking to just have one chip now.

so far its a toss up between the 670 and the 770 and as there is only 40 pounds between the two i am tempted to burn the cash on the 770. i'd like to know from you knowleable folks the folowing in order not to make the same mistake as i did with the GTX 295 this card needs to last a good 2 years

1) what perfomance boost will i see going from a 295 to a 770 from what i have found out about 6x as quick :) am i right?
2) are the 670 and 770 using single chips no sli .
3) i have an 850 watt PSU will i need more?
4) any other points / advice you can think of that might help.


sorry I probably dont have all that completely right on the tech but you get what i mean :)


Thx all

P
 
A 7950 with a bit of an overclock, because Kepler GPUs are rubbish for any sort of compute/CUDA task.

It doesn't sound like you need CUDA either, so a 7950 would be much more sensible, as they seem to have better viewport performance, and the extra RAM will certainly help in this situation, but if you do need CUDA, then a GTX580 is far more appropriate.
 
I've been looking at a 670 for gaming but also CUDA application in 3D modeling, specifically rendering in blender. It's the only reason I haven't gone for a much cheaper 7950.

Why does kepler not do CUDA very well?? I have been looking at second hand 580s but I'd really prefer more horsepower for games.
 
The 670 doesn't do CUDA very well because its double precision floating point performance (FP64) has been majorly gimped by nVidia.

I believe this is because they were unhappy with the number of people buying GeForce cards instead of Quadro with the massively increased prices as a lot of people were buying, say GTX580s for games AND CUDA performance because they were just as powerful in CUDA apps as the Quadro cards.

So now they've gimped the 6 series FP64 in an attempt to get people going for Quadro cards.

So now it's a case of you have to choose, CUDA or gaming performance. Though you could always run a secondary nVidia 5 series card for CUDA peformance.
 
You could have the best of both if you can find a GTX5XX card, it'd still render faster than the CPU and you could use it as a secondary card so it's just for CUDA whilst having a 7950 as the main GPU for games.
 
Compared to the 6 series, yes. I don't know about running hybrid though, you should just be able to have the software pick up and use the GPU which is capable of CUDA performance.

You should be able to get a 560 or 570 or a decent amount anyways!
 
You might want to double check this, but remember to buy a card with enough vram for you scene to fit into when using the Cycles renderer in Blender.

This was how it was a few months ago when I last used it, so it could have changed since.
 
If you are only using blender I don't think it works on AMD cards very well at all at the moment, so it will only render on the CPU.

GPU rendering makes it possible to use your graphics card for rendering, instead of the CPU. This can speed up rendering, because modern GPUs are quite designed to do a lot of number crunching. On the other hand, they also have some limitations for rendering complex scenes, due to more limited memory, and interactivity issue when using the same graphics card for display and rendering.

Cycles has two GPU rendering modes, through CUDA, which is the preferred method for NVidia graphics cards, and OpenCL, which is intended to support rendering on AMD/ATI graphics cards. The implementation of OpenCL is only in an experimental stage and disabled in official builds.
Click to expand...

Taken from here.
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/Render/Cycles/GPU_Rendering
 
im not to concerned with CUDA, although using some of the unbiased renders might be worth ago in the future especially Vray RT. but for me all i need is fast max view port naviation etc. tbh any card here will be better than my current 295. intresting however to read the 580 having more CUDA cores which were that good the quattro communtity went for them over the more pricey cards.

but anyway if someone could answer the questions in my orginal post i'd apperciate it :)

1) what perfomance boost will i see going from a 295 to a 770 from what i have found out about 6x as quick am i right?
2) are the 670 and 770 using single chips no sli.
3) i have an 850 watt PSU will i need more?
 
PaulW said:
1) what perfomance boost will i see going from a 295 to a 770 from what i have found out about 6x as quick am i right?
2) are the 670 and 770 using single chips no sli.
3) i have an 850 watt PSU will i need more?
Click to expand...

1) Around 3-4 times quicker, going by this set of Heaven 3.0 results someone put up on the EVGA forum - a 680 is slightly slower than a 770 :

http://www.evga.com/forums/tm.aspx?&m=1519228&mpage=1

2) Yes. The only recent dual gpu card from Nvidia is the 690.

3) That will be more than enough if it is a good, reliable brand. What make is it?

4) If you think you be rendering on the gpu at some point, then buy the quickest card with at least 2gb vram that you can afford.

For gpu-based rendering then afaik the more vram you have the better, but VrayRT might be different in that respect ( never used it myself ).
 
PaulW said:
im not to concerned with CUDA, although using some of the unbiased renders might be worth ago in the future especially Vray RT. but for me all i need is fast max view port naviation etc. tbh any card here will be better than my current 295. intresting however to read the 580 having more CUDA cores which were that good the quattro communtity went for them over the more pricey cards.

but anyway if someone could answer the questions in my orginal post i'd apperciate it :)

1) what perfomance boost will i see going from a 295 to a 770 from what i have found out about 6x as quick am i right?
2) are the 670 and 770 using single chips no sli.
3) i have an 850 watt PSU will i need more?
Click to expand...

A 7950 will give you more performance for viewport useage, also VrayRT isn't unbiased, but it does actually support OpenCL so will work on an AMD card.

With a 770 you are literally paying 50-60% more money for less performance.
 
vrayRT doesn't work with AMD cards unfortunately, otherwise the 7950 would be great for it. 670 4gb prob best bang for buck atm
 
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