Time for a new card, not sure what to buy?

[Vishera]

Okay, so I recently got involved in some animation projects. Nothing major, but I am contributing to rendering and editing everything into the final cut. SO, I noticed my GTX 750 is starting to chug a little bit, plus I wanna get into dual, eventually triple, monitor setup and it has only one HDMI port I dunno about you guys, but I would rather have one singular monitor type on my desk rather than getting multiple different ones for each separate connector (VGA, DVI, HDMI). So I need help picking out a decent card that will not break the bank of roughly $330 too badly. I would also like to buy that second monitor next month with the card If anyone has any suggestions for a card and perhaps a monitor please feel free to share

Btw I have looked at the nVidia GTX 900 series so far. Good or bad?

My specs in case bottlenecks are a concern: i5-4460 CPU, 8GB PNY XLR8 1866 MHz RAM, ASRock PRO3 Z97 Mobo.

 

[Witchdoctor]

I would look for a used Titan for your needs

that gets you 6GB's of Vram in at that $ 300.00 range

Your budget does not support a 970 or better and a 960 is not a mega upgrade by any stretch

 

[JrClocker]

You can purchase adapters to go from the various formats on your existing card to HDMI. For example:

DVI to HDMI:
http://www.amazon.com/AmazonBasics-...F8&qid=1458146286&sr=1-6&keywords=dvi+to+hdmi

DP to HDMI:
http://www.amazon.com/Rankie®-Plate...458146325&sr=1-6&keywords=displayport+to+hdmi

On my setup, I run 3 of the same monitor...all HDMI. 1 runs off the HDMI port on the card, and the other 2 run off a DP to HDMI converter.

 

[wingman99]

+1 for the cable converters that is all you need.

 

[Vishera]

Yes the converters fix the monitor issue but there's still the fact that the card takes an ungodly amount of time to render the animation graphics, and the videos that they eventually become. I have to sit down at roughly noon or 1:00 to render the animation graphics off of the sketches I'm given and i have to leave it on over night when I go to bed for the video to finish. I looked for a used Titan but couldn't find anything under $600. I could scrape together another $30 for $360, does this put me in range for any good cards?

 

[wingman99]

Does your animation use cuda on your Graphics card? Otherwise I would be looking at a x99 platform.

 

[Vishera]

I'm not entirely sure to be honest. Would upgrading the GPU help at all if it doesn't? I just spent an arm and a leg building this machine. I can't afford to toss away the mobo and CPU already. The only thing I didn't upgrade was the GPU, hence why I'm looking into it now.

 

[wingman99]

What is the name of the application that renders the animation so we can see if your Graphics card is used? Do you play games, that is mostly what a good graphics card do?

 

[tachi1247]

If you're in the states then a 970 is well within your budget. Newegg seems to have one in their sale email at least once per week.

 

[Vishera]

I use Anime Studio 11. And yes, I have recently gotten into Steam games like Undertale, I also play Minecraft and hope to play Assassin's creed and The Division.

- - - Updated - - -

If you're in the states then a 970 is well within your budget. Newegg seems to have one in their sale email at least once per week.

Yes I saw that on their website. PCPartpicker has even better deals, I'm not sure what withcdoctor was referring to?

 

[Lochekey]

So I've done some googling on this program and from what I can find is the program will utilize opengl to accelerate the live preview while you are working but I cannot find anything that shows the gpu will handle the final render.

Rendering like this can be can be a very cpu intensive task so it can take a while on a standard home pc.

Can you find an option in your render settings to use the gpu? You can test this out by running a short render and seeing if your cpu is loaded or if your gpu is loaded.

I don't know what you are trying to render exactly but it could be matching out your ram as well causing you to page fault out which will slow things down. I had to increase my ram when I was trying to render images out of Solidworks as I was eating up more than 8gb of ram.

 

[wingman99]

Looks like you only have GPU acceleration not GPU rendering with Anime Studio 11 and memory recommended is 2GB. For gaming I would purchase GTX 970 if it's in your budget.