GPU and Rendering

does anyone have any experience with rendering with a normal GPU card? (not a quattro card)

cuz I can't find anything usefull on the internet other than GPU's dont render images or animation, they only display them while modeling. Which is quite dissappointing after I quite gaming.

Even my 8800GTX was considered pretty useless. It barely beats my current 6200LE card in CINEBENCH 3 times.....

Im using Rhino, Vray, Cinema4D, Solidworks and 3Dstudiomax.




...........anyone?


System, X2 5600+@2,9 4gigs_mem, Vista 64, asus SLi 590(ithink) mobo with standard OC tools, all runs about 35 celcius, 1.5TB 32mb cache. (am saving up for Core i7 system)

yeah i just read a thread on that, but apperently that had already gone dead.


guess this thread will too...

Most rendering engines are written to use the CPU for calculations. You would need to find a rendering engine specifically written to use the GPU for rendering. Search "Nvidia Gelato" for an example. It takes a lot of practice to get good using any particular rendering software, so I don't know if its worth your time to learn a GPU-written rendering engine. But if you're making this a hobby, then go ahead!

What 'softmodding' a Geforce card will do is to make your computer system think it has a much more expensive, Nvidia Quadro card. This is done because some programs (like 3DS Max) have better viewport performance using specially designed drivers for these cards. Search "Maxtreme" (but again, viewport performance isn't the same thing as rendering a final image)

Hope this helps.