I have a GTX 1060 6GB in my current build, and I also have a GTX 960 2GB in storage. I was wondering if I got one of these bad boys, and got both of my GPUs in one build (Not SLI or CrossFire, just in the same system.) Would I be able to use both GPUs for rendering simutaneously? I don't care if this means haveing them both render seperate tiles in one instance of blender, or rendering seperate frames in two instances. I'm using cycles for everything I do.
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asked Nov 29 '16 at 19:44
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You can, as long they are from the same brand (AMD, or NVidia) you should be able to use them simultaneously to render in Blender Cycles.
If you keep them out of any proprietary GPU pairing technologies setup like non-SLI or Crossfire and the operating system detects them as two discrete graphics cards, Blender should be able to see them as discreet GPUs in the user preferences.
This will virtually linearly decreasing render times proportionally to each additional compute device performance, as opposed to pairing technologies which have significant performance penalties and lose efficiency with each additional GPU.
You can then prior to rendering select which one to use, or both simultaneously, if you want. You can also have each instance of Blender use its own GPU independently, although you will likely experience performance decreases caused by bottlenecks anywhere else in your system.
answered Nov 29 '16 at 22:53
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2$\begingroup$ Worth noting: available vRAM for rendering will be limited to the size of the smallest card. So if one of the cards has 6Gb and the other one 2, the 1060 will only use 2 for rendering. $\endgroup$ – cegaton Nov 30 '16 at 4:01
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$\begingroup$ Yes, that's right, forgot to mention that. That is true for rendering the same scene with bots cards only, I believe. If you render two separate files at the same time each card will be able to fully utilize it's total amount of memory individually, as far as I know. $\endgroup$ – Duarte Farrajota Ramos♦ Nov 30 '16 at 5:34
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$\begingroup$ @cegaton I don't mean to bump an old question, but does that mean I could have 3 Instances of blender Rendering at once? On on my 1060, one on the 960, then one on CPU? $\endgroup$ – Josh Silveous Dec 7 '16 at 1:24
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2$\begingroup$ @JoshSilveous You can have many instances at once. Be aware that at some point you'll get diminishing returns when you hit the limit of what your computer can handle efficiently. Do keep in mind that even when you render on GPU, the CPU is not idle: there are still a lot of processing going on with it. If what you are after is efficiency look into more gpus of the same capacity or a render farm service (much more affordable than getting your own hardware) $\endgroup$ – cegaton Dec 7 '16 at 2:39
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$\begingroup$ @cegaton I was not aware that GPU rendering used CPU, so then Just rendering seperate instances with two GPUs would be better? $\endgroup$ – Josh Silveous Dec 7 '16 at 2:40
