BETTER GPU FOR BLENDER CYCLES RENDERING

Ray traced rendering can be very slow.  I was curious to see how much performance could be gained by adding a modest graphics card to my system.  Actually I was more than curious, my simple sci-fi corridor scene was taking over 10 minutes to render.  At 24 fps that's 4 hours (240/60) per second which is just too slow especially considering I can render this exact same scene in Unity comfortably at 60 fps.

Results: 7.5x performance boost

Getting right down to it, the upgraded GPU gave me a 7.5x improvement in rendering speed.  This makes rendering long image sequences more feasible and more importantly means that I can regularly check the final rendered image as I'm working without having to take 10 minute breaks.

For a single 1080p frame:

• NVIDIA GT640 1GB 583 seconds
• NVIDIA GTX1060 3GB  78 seconds

​Note that I'd already set Cycles to use GPU acceleration and had increased my tile size to something larger than the default.  I haven't tried to optimize beyond that.  There could well be more performance available with some tweaking to settings.
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Upgrading the GPU

My PC is an HP Phoenix from about 3 years ago.  For some reason HP don't generally let you buy these machines with a good GPU.  It came with a no name GT640 which is more than adequate for HD video editing in Sony Vegas and Photoshop.   I picked an NVIDIA GeForce GTX1060 3GB from EVGA as an upgrade.  This is a mid range gaming card and can be had for under $200. I picked this card as its a shorty that fits easily inside my compact case and only needs a 6 pin power connector.  When picking a new GPU, case size and power requirements are at least as important as benchmarks and CUDA cores. There is nothing worse than getting that new graphics card home and finding it doesn't fit or the machine won't start because the GPU needs too much power.

What I'm working on...

This summer one of my goals is to become proficient at using modern asset creation tools for games and movies.  I'm an experienced programmer and I understand graphics algorithms pretty well, or I can if I sit there and hit the books for a while, but I'm severely lacking on the content side.  So learning Blender whilst making assets for a new film seems like a good use of my time.  There are a few things I want to try on this project.

• Photogrammetry: As a keen photographer, the idea of making models from photos is very appealing.
• Realtime Vs Raytraced:  Having seen some of the demos from Epic and Unity lately I'm interested in trying to render the assets using a game engine as well as ray tracing. 

But first, I need to drag myself up to speed on the basics which means basic 3D modelling, texturing and animation.  It's fun and it will be more fun, now I don't have to wait 10 minutes to see the results!
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Rendering in Blender