[ale] Blender and GPU.... What to buy?

[Michael Trausch]

For my current work (videos less than a couple of minutes long with low complexity in NTSC resolution) my CPU does just fine. However, I would like to speed up rendering for scenes to be somewhat faster.

It seems that Blender supports "CUDA GPU devices with compute ability > 2.0", which the tesla line all does. 

However I currently have ATI video output that works well, and I'd like to retain that if at all possible. So, a few questions that I hope someone has the answer to, in the hopes of saving some money in research...

1. Can I have both ATI and NVIDIA hardware in the same system, using ATI for display and NVIDIA just for processing? I like having a well working KMS setup which supports both X11 and Weston/Wayland. 

2. Does anyone know what would be the most painless in terms of well-supported devices on Fedora 21 or Fedora 22 workstation? Ideally I just want to plug it in and be able to tell blender to use it. 

3. The K80 seems to be the best bet. Can anyone confirm this?

4. Lastly, has the state of NVIDIA binary drivers in general improved? I've been out of the NVIDIA world since probably 2010 or so. At least then, it was a royal PITA to make work (right), but it was okay after that as long as nothing changed. 

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