this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2026
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I think how good of a GPU you need is almost entirely dependent on the complexity of the scene itself.
I was gonna say, I used to render pretty sick Videos on a 1070, I think you'll be fine unless you work at Pixar.
And it's not like Blender is made for real time rendering anyways. If three seconds of video takes a day to render, that's still fine.
I rendered a 5min 4k60 video in blender / octane for a month, which suggests modern cards should easily do more chill tasks. And if you genuinely need the setup I did, you have 10x the work just taking care of modelling,particles, vfx afterfx, composition cut, ...
Either you reached that level or you didn't
What I meant was Blender is very bad at degrading gracefully to work fairly well with older OpenGL versions. As soon as your stuff is just a tad older than Blender supports, that's it. You're left out in the cold.
I have very modest Blender needs (mostly I need to rework prosthesis models for 3D-printing), my GPU is fairly recent but very low spec, yet sufficient for what I need. But the driver only implements OpenGL 3.0, so essentially I'm stuck with Blender 4.0.2 if I want to make use of hardware acceleration.
Any higher version and Blender simply pukes out a message saying that my GPU doesn't have the features it requires. Or I have to degrade to software GL, which is not acceptable.
Blender has always been like that. The Blender developers assume their audience is mostly professionals with endless resources to throw at their software project, and they just don't give a rat's ass about making their stuff usable for people with older hardware.
Not to minimize your plight there, but that sounds like a fairly uncommon situation. The last version of OpenGL 3 was released in 2010, which was 16 years ago, so if you have a recent card that's unable to use a version newer than that, then your driver is strictly to blame, not Blender (If Blender supports OpenGL 4.0, which was also released in 2010, that would mean it still supports 16 year old cards, such as a Geforce GTX 460, which would be pretty spectacular support and backwards compatibility. IMHO, the opposite if expecting users to constantly upgrade).
May I ask what card you have that suffers from this issue?
You said it yourself, that's a card problem