Sketchup/Indigo and GPU question.

[RobertLee]

Hi
I am using SU7 with vRay now on a Xeon Quad core with a v5200, the speed seem ok, but I heard that Indigo can make use of Cuda with nVidia and get some unreal rendering time because the GPU can take care of the work, so my questions are :
1. Is it better to use a ATI (ie. HD6950 Dual GPU + 2GB) or stick to nVidia because some said AMD drivers can crash at random.
2. Would I see much performance difference between a single and a dualcore GPU ? ay HD6970 verse 6950-Dual
3. I assumed that if the GPU takes care of the rendering, a basic quad CPU + 8GB on XP64 would be fine as a platform ? I can add another 8GB if Indigo can use them to good effects.
4. If I were to built a new rendering machine using the new AMD 8-Cores @ 3.6GHz and 32GB plus a 6950-dualcore, would this make a superfast rendering machine ? or would I be beter sticking with my Xeon Quad 3GHz/12MB Cache ?
5. Are there any real users out there who had used vRay and switched to Indigo ? I would really like to hear from users in the real world as to speed, quality and the quality of the software as to how stable it is.

Would be really grateful for any feedback on this . Thanks.

[lycium]

Hi Robert, welcome to the forum!

1. Right now nVidia have the GPU computing upper hand, so I'd suggest to stick with them for the moment.

2. Currently Indigo only supports a single GPU, however this will change in the future.

3. Indigo's GPU acceleration is a hybrid mode, where the GPU accelerates some of the CPU's computations, but not all; this means you still need a fast CPU, which is often the bottleneck (however when this happens, you'll be rendering at pretty good speeds!).

4. Your current Xeon is very fast, faster than the new AMD chips, so I'd suggest sticking with that.