One of the most asked questions from new users of Blender, is what hardware is best to get the best results from cycles. So many people have been lead to believe that their hardware seriously impacts their use, but do not understand that it does not impact them near as much as they think. A lot of professional artists use pre-built systems, or even laptops to create most of their models. There are only a few hardware changes that can benefit Blender, but a lot of performance comes from knowing how to configure Blender.
First and foremost, I would like to present two articles that will help you optimize Blender. Both articles were written by Andrew Price of Blender Guru, specifically to help people get a better performance.
4 Easy Ways To Speed Up Cycles
13 Ways To Reduce Render Times
Both articles are a "must read" for any Blender user unaware of getting the most out of Blender.
Hardware
Now on to the hardware portion. To begin, the majority of hardware performance in Blender affects the Cycles render engine, and just like it sounds, specifically the rendering time. Your video card can definitely make an impact on the render time itself, as well as the ability to render previews in the viewfinder very fast. If you are simply doing small models like game assets, or character models, this can be done fairly quickly with the CPU itself with optimal settings. When dealing with entire scenes, or very high poly renders, the video card can help immensely.
Video Cards
If you are wanting to get that nice super-quick viewfinder preview rendering, or want to cut your render times in half, and then some, you'll want to put your GPU to use. At this point in time, Blender Cycles has support for nVidia GPUs, but the ATI/AMD GPUs are still a "work in progress". While you can get an ATI GPU to respond with the 14.4 catalyst drivers, you can experience quite a few crashes, and missing spots on renders. While I'm sure ATI support will be coming very soon, since AMD has started working towards making their drivers work better for Blender Cycles, they are certainly not stable enough to use at this time. If you are an ATI user like myself, do not worry, you can use an nVidia card as a secondary GPU in your system, specifically for Blender.
With nVidia GPUs, you want to make sure you are using at least a 400 series GPU to help you render. Blender Cycles takes advantage of the CUDA platform that is found in these GPUs, and all newer models after. The more CUDAs the better, but you want to make sure your video card also has a good amount of memory as well. The more the better, as you do not want to run out when rendering, or that fast time isn't going to happen, and sometimes the render won't as well. Needless to say, you also want to make sure that the card has GDDR5, and not GDDR3; the speed difference is extremely noticeable.
For all of you fellow ATI users, and users that just need a video card to render, don't fret, there are cheap solutions. I recently found an nVidia GTX 650, with 2G GDDR5, and 380 CUDA cores, for $100. It makes a great basic render card, without having to sacrifice your ATI, or having to take out a loan. If you are on a laptop that lacks an nVidia 400 series or higher, don't worry either, there is a solution. While it will cost a bit more, you can make an external video card. If you're not the type to be "handy", you can also buy pre-made external GPU boxes.
If you want to go "all out", and get a bleeding-edge video card to help with Blender, make sure to check the following specifications when picking your card out:
700 Series nVidia GPU
# of CUDA cores (1500 or higher)
Core Clock Speed (1000MHz or higher)
Memory Clock Speed (5000MHz or higher)
Memory Size (2G or higher, at least)
Memory Type (GDDR5 or higher)
If you simply want a decent card, without spending a lot of money, simply look for total CUDA cores, clock speed, at least a 600 series GPU, and at least 2GB of GDDR5 memory. Make sure to check each of these specs, and do NOT rely on the GPU series alone. Various retailers will allow you to pick these specs while comparing them with prices.
Real World Rendering
After reading all of this, you may wonder why professionals simply use basic pre-built systems, and don't really worry about computer performance. In the real world a lot of professionals, especially those who make large 3D scenes, tend to render their projects with "render farms". Instead of leaving their systems on overnight, and waking up to a render, they simply have a much more powerful system do it for them. When you start to get into high-poly renders, animations, or cycles intensive scenes, you will find yourself unable to do much else, but wait for a render to finish. Instead of making your system unusable, you can use Render Street to do it for you. You upload the files, and it does it all for you.
On the other side of the spectrum, many artists will render large scenes, and animations on the CPU regardless of their video card, simply because any video card might lack the memory to handle. Rendering scenes that require 12GB of memory, is obviously something a video card isn't going to handle. While there might be solutions from high-end professional cards, it's simply not cost-efficient. Even large studios are known to use render farms, and even when modeling, they will use high-end desktop cards, and not video cards like the nVidia Quatro, or ATI Firepro. Either way, I want to at least make this apparent to any person, so that it is not a surprise later on. In addition, make sure to fill your system up with RAM if you plan to do large renders. If it's not obvious, you need to be using a 64-bit operation system to be able to use more than 3.25GB of RAM, and pair it with at least 16GB of memory. This will allow you to render just about anything, before resulting in the use of a render farms.
In summary, this is all you have to worry about when dealing with hardware for Blender. It's not mandatory to upgrade to work with Blender, but now you know how it can help with your Blender performance, and overall planning.
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