SLI 2x960...worth it?

DDCreate

Yes another GC Question...

I have a 4GB 960GTX/i7 3.30/24GB RAM at the moment. My render times sometimes are a bit long and I've been looking to reduce it just like everyone else. I was looking into a GTX 980 but was advised by a Customer Support guy on New Egg that a more economical approach would be to SLI another 960 into my system. The rational being that it will double my CUDA cores and VRAM to 8GB. On a YouTube video I think the person said (and this was about SLI 2GB 960 for gaming) that even with two 2GB cards, you still only are working with 2GB VRAM. Is that right? It's cheaper to go this route (even with the PSU upgrade) but I just want to make sure I'm getting a decent amount of bang for my buck. My scenes aren't overly intricate, they typically have 2-3 people in them and I don't think that's too awful demanding on my system.

I'm just hoping someone out there has some familiarity with this sort of things and can explain in laymans terms. Thanks for any info that might come and sorry for asking another GPU question.

mjc1016

You won't double your memory...

And besides, Iray doesn't work with SLI enabled, very well. 

Yesl, doubling the cores will speed things up, but you aren't going to get more memory/bigger scenes.

DDCreate

Awww!! Well so should I still get another 960 and NOT enable SLI? Or just scrap that idea and save for a 980?

Hiro Protagonist

DDCreate said:

Awww!! Well so should I still get another 960 and NOT enable SLI? Or just scrap that idea and save for a 980?

A 980 Ti has 2816 cores, more than twice as many as a 960 and of course it has 2GB more ram and faster clock speed so I would say save. Depending on how much patience you have, there are also the upcoming Pascal GPUs, but there are no details of the consumer range and I gather we won't be seeing those until 2017.

 

mjc1016

The cheapest 980Ti I saw was around $550.  Most of the 960s are in the $200-300 range...and on Ebay they are selling used for $150-250....