Similar to my own experience, Steve!

Piotr

I believe that the next card I will buy will be when the GTX700's [whenever they] come out (they're skipping 600 I guess to have the same number starting as AMD/ATI), but I'd like to buy one with at least 2GB of VRAM, so I'll have to see where that falls. I do 3D modeling and animation with a renderer that utilizes GPU (Octane renderer).

Alternatively I may look at a GTX580 3GB, but I'll have to see what performance comes from the new cards and what their prices are going to be.

Dave

Dave, I use Cinema 4D, also for animation, but in a flavor that I don't think could use Octane. Gosh, that would be nice to use my GPU, as some of my C4D renders really tax my CPU.

The GTX580 is a whopper. I had the foresight to build my rig with a Corsair 1000W PSU...and I'm now glad that I did. I benchmarked the GPU last night and overclocked it to 940MHz at stock voltage. A stress test took it up to 85C, where the fan is something to behold. It felt (and sounded) like a hairdryer blowing out the rear of my full tower.

Steve

It felt (and sounded) like a hairdryer blowing out the rear of my full tower.
Fab!

I too put the 1kw PSU on my present Beast. Having had PSUs fail and rattles and BSOD, the extra couple of quids seemed churlish not to.

Hair dryer! Lol

G

lol, I hear ya about the loud fans :)

I've got dual GTX260's and that does decent with Octane, not as well with Vegas because it's single GPU only.

What version of C4D wouldn't work with Octane? Right now, they're exclusively Obj/Mtl import, but they're changing that to have built in renderer's (right now only MAX has the built in one, but C4D is due to get one also I believe). I've been thinking about C4D, but learned on Blender and haven't had a great need to use something else as of yet. Most of what I do is not char. animation, etc... just 3D typography, titles, and mograph work.

I've got a 750W Seasonic ( one of the few PSU's I trust still ), and I think that will cover me for a while.

Veering somewhat OT, Dave, I have C4D Broadcast, second from the "bottom." I'm aware of the Obj import from C4D into Octane, but I was mainly interested in animation imports. I couldn't find anything about C4D Broadcast that allowed direct exporting of animation to Octane (I'm a newb, so I could misunderstand something here). If and when an internal rendering engine for Octane comes to C4D, I may snap it up.

Admittedly, I'm cutting my teeth on C4D as my first exposure to 3D (animated titles, logos, similar to you.). My learning curve is near vertical. But C4D beats the pants off trying to attempt anything fancy-schmancy in VP's titlers or even BorisFX. Not even close.

C4D Broadcast.....will have a look at it for animating titles and logos.

Have heard of it before but was thinking it was more like 3D environments.

Will see how we get along,
Thanks

Rob

Rob, Cinema 4D is actually capable of doing just about anything you can possibly imagine in 3D space. I've made static titles, animated intro logos, all in 3D. It's probably the deepest program I have ever used. Period. I'm still awed by what I can pull off, and I've barely tapped into the program.

BorisFX and NewBlue Titler, especially as plugins to Vegas, are fine and really convenient for some 3D titles and handling of simple objects, but my needs and modeling desires went beyond, so I got a commercial package, Cinema 4D. If you do the same, be prepared to empty your pocketbook and many nights of free time. (Blender is open source and free; I got Cinema 4D for its relative ease of use, near seamless interaction with After Effects, and gobs of support/training).

I shot and edited an event for a local charity. As a "value added" bonus, I took their 2D logo and turned it into a 3D animation to open the video, which was my first C4D project ever. See it below (the first several seconds):

Blender is by no means a really deadline crucial sort of tool, but it models well enough for me. I've thought about buying into C4D because I've heard that it's for 3D animation what Vegas is for editing ( fast interface and gets something good very quickly ). That said, I've heard similar about Lightwave too, so I'm not so sure which direction I'd go if it were me, and so far, the price of the packages has been enough of a barrier, that I would rather put that money in my pocket and use blender (*for the time being*). I believe the C4D tool to export obj/mtl to Octane standalone is in their customer forums section. It's a tool written for C4D, but as I'm not a C4D user, I don't know entirely.

Anyway, if you're interested, I could do a bit of digging around for you on their customer only forums.

Dave

About 2 years ago, we upgraded (3) workstations to the newly released Socket 1366 motherboards, I7 920 CPUs & new DDR3 memory. Total upgrade cost was about $1000 per workstation.

About 1.5 years ago we doubled the speed of one by simply dropping-in a newly released 6-core 980X CPU ($1000). That chip cut rendering in half and has saved us hours of labor when we had to meet a deadline. At the time I did not have time to tear-apart & rebuild, so merely dropping in a new CPU was a a10 minute job with a 100% speed improvement. Very nice!

We have budgeted approx. $1200 towards upgrades for 2012.

1) We can spend $1200 and update (ONE) old Q6600 system to a Socket 2011 with 6-core Sandy Bridge CPU. This would allow us to drop-in an 8-core CPU when they are released. This type of upgrade is what we did two years ago and it worked out nicely.

2) We can spend $1200 and update (TWO) I7 920 workstations to 6-core Socket 1366 CPUs (non Sandy Bridge, but still within 20%). We would immediately benefit from two faster workstations vs. one and there would be no down-time due to installing the OS from the ground-up.

3) Or we can spend $1200 and update all three older systems with much faster GPUs. All (3) would render faster (provided Vegas 11 has no more issues after the next update). One GPU would likely be a 580 or new 700 series, and the others would be a little more affordable but still game-changers.

My gut tells me that option #1 is the best route because the newer motherboard provides PCIe 3.0, USB 3.0 and other features our 2 year-old systems do not have. I have never sunk a lot of money into systems that are over 2 years old...

However, GPU rendering changes everything. Like the OP and others have shared, a fast GPU can bring new life to an older system and you do not have to install & test a new hardware & software install. What I may do is buy a GPU from a local place that offers easy returns. I would test it out on all (3) workstations to see what types of real-world performance changes are noticed. Then, make a decision based on results under real working conditions...

Any suggestions?

Rhino,

How about option2 with 2 i7 980 (not the X). This would give some strong performance upograde to 2 machines

Ted

Rhino, to strain my metaphor a little, I believe that my "breath" of new life was really only a breath. Just a breath. Had I a lot more discretionary cash and patience on hand, I would have preferred to upgrade my CPU, mobo, and memory.

In particular, since the time that I built my monster system years ago, when I used VP8, I incorporated a LOT more software into my workflow that is 100% CPU-dependent: Photoshop, Illustrator, AfterEffects, and Cinema 4D, to name most of them. The major paradigm change was VP moving to optional GPU-dependence, and I felt that my new GPU was a comparatively economical way to extend the life of my system insofar as I rely upon Vegas. (From the tangent above, I might also benefit from a GPU-oriented third party renderer for Cinema 4D, but that remains to be seen.)

If I didn't rely so heavily on Vegas, I might have just waited to drop the coin on a new CPU, mobo, and memory. I guess this prompts me to ask how your options 1-3 address other software requirements on your end.

Oh, and I'm sure that I could smoke the latest games with my new GPU if I was gamer. But I need another time-suck like another hole in my head.

BTW, last night I overclocked my GTX580 from the factory 950MHz to 1010MHz on stock voltage. It didn't even whimper. That may give me little benefit in renders from Vegas, but it's still cool... in really geeky way.

-Steve

Rob, Cinema 4D is actually capable of doing just about anything you can possibly imagine in 3D space

Thanks vtxrocketeer for posting your video.
I have been busy on the weekend, I downloaded tutorials for C4D and will eventually take a look at them and download a C4D demo and see how it behaves.

Rob

vtx, there's a few simple things I've done with blender and octane here.

http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.132320193554429.24713.124132797706502&type=1&l=999be698fd

Just some very basic stuff that I've done, but I don't spend all day every day on 3D by any stretch and am entirely free education trained.

Dave

Dave, so you're the Scattershot 3D logo guy? Nice stuff! I also love the faith-based work. Thanks for posting it.

I got a free education, too, with essentially one exception. I signed up for lynda.com. Cinema4D and AfterEffects were just too much for me to stuff into my head without some professional help (for the software, not my head). The lynda.com subscription tutorials are very well worth a few bucks.

-Steve

I didn't design the logo's they were created by another, but I created the 3D models, did the animations, etc... with VASST. I learned blender from blender guru, and blender cookie. I learned AfterEffects from Video Copilot, and I also learned them both from trial and error as well. A lot of the things I do, I can't show publicly so the faith based stuff and non-profits that I work with are things that I get to display for all, but I've been thinking about putting a reel together that has excerpts and seeing if I can get an ok for some of the things in part. Anyway, thanks for the kind words, if you like cinema 4D, you need to go to www.greyscalegorilla.com, he's a bit crass at times, but he's got some pretty nice plugs for C4D and some nice tuts as well.

Dave