Rendering in Blender using Cycles
Recently my son and I began working on a short movie for fun. We wanted to use mostly rendered environments and green screen the characters in. After designing the first world, we had a problem. My Intel i7 was taking 9 hours per frame to render in Blender's Cycles. This would make a few minute movie impossible. I purchased a Nvidia GTX 750ti SC for around $130 from Amazon. This card rated highest value for dollar over at Passmark.
For use in Cycles the card must support CUDA 2+. To be usable the card needs around 2 gb of RAM. Even with 2 gb on my card I ran out of RAM with particle scenes. How did the card perform?
CPU, i7 quad core 920 @ 2.66 ghz with 8 gb RAM
9 hrs 45 min
GPU, Nvidia 750ti SC 2gb DDR5
5 min 45 sec
The results?
Watch the video full screen and in 1080 for the best quality.