Secondary GPU

[Andrea Alessi]

Unfortunatley the GT1030 is a very cheap and low performance card - the current shortage of GPUs has inflated prices a lot.

Zephyr can use multiple GPUs of differnt types, as long as they are NVIDIA. So indeed you can mix different GPUs together and it iwll automatically use the first NVIDIA card that it finds, in your case , the 1030.

[ktulo37]

I got my GT 1030 today to try this out. Worst case, the 1030 will go into one of my kids' PCs. This proves that a secondary GPU will improve processing since my primary is an AMD.

Without Nvidia GT1030

With Nvidia GT 1030

--- System info --- Application Version 6.004 No Cuda GPU Found CPU Type AMD Ryzen 5 2600 Six-Core Processor Number of Cores 12 RAM Total 16312 Mb Disk Disk drive: C: Available disk space 471788 Mb Total disk space 953110 Mb Solid state disk Yes --- Benchmark Results --- SfM running times: 246 seconds MVS running times: 356 seconds Mesh running times: 274 seconds Texture running times: 77 seconds Overall running times: 15 minutes and 53 seconds

--- System info --- Application Version 6.004 GPU #1 Type NVIDIA GeForce GT 1030 Memory 2048 Mb Clock 1518500 Khz Processors 3 CPU Type AMD Ryzen 5 2600 Six-Core Processor Number of Cores 12 RAM Total 16312 Mb Disk Disk drive: C: Available disk space 467338 Mb Total disk space 953110 Mb Solid state disk Yes --- Benchmark Results --- SfM running times: 137 seconds MVS running times: 398 seconds Mesh running times: 129 seconds Texture running times: 84 seconds Overall running times: 12 minutes and 28 seconds

Basically, it ignored my primary GPU. Overall, improvement. I would have appreciated on a 5+ hour render I had the other day. I wouldn't say it was worth buying the card though.

Hope this is helpful for other folks!

[cam3d]

Hi ktulo37 - Welcome to the forum!

Adding a CUDA based GPU will almost certainly improve your processing times, however a card like the 1030 GT is fairly weak and may or may not be worth it, depending on your use case.

If you install a secondary NVIDIA GPU next to your AMD GPU I believe that Zephyr should still be able to use it, but I'll ping Andrea just in case because I'm not 100% sure.

[ktulo37]

I have a Radeon RX 5700 currently in my PC-- great card, useless with 3d Zephyr. Long story short, I don't want to replace my Radeon, but I don't mind spending money on an inexpensive NVidia to assist with the rendering. Will Zephyr use the secondary card without issue? If so, will adding a GeForce GT 1030 to my PC make a large enough difference in the rendering time to be worth installing?