On Wednesday 02 March 2016 21:44:29 Nikos Chantziaras wrote: > On 02/03/16 13:50, Peter Humphrey wrote: > > It's approaching time to invest in a new system, and I'd like the > > panel's > > views on which make of graphics card to choose: AMD, nVidia or Radeon. I > > don't want to start a flame war, but which of those would give me the > > best performance in GPU calculations? I have some BOINC projects in > > mind, which apparently are greatly accelerated by using GPUs as well as > > CPUs. > > > > The nouveau driver for nVidia can't do CUDA (GPU) calculations so I'd > > have to use the nVidia driver; I don't know about the others which is > > why I'm asking. > > > > Does anyone here have an opinion to offer? > > If you need 64-bit FP compute, AMD Radeon is your only choice. NVidia > only supports 32-bit FP and cripples 64-bit FP on consumer cards, > rendering them virtually useless; you'd have to buy a "professional" > card (thousands of dollars). > > So you might want to check whether your applications need 64-bit FP or > 32-bit.
So for flexibility in the future it looks like AMD Firepro or similar. (I assume your comments on Radeon will also apply to Firepro.) I don't know whether these project are 64-bit today, but even if not, they may be in a year or two. Thanks Nikos, and to James and Rich too. Time to start saving up... -- Rgds Peter
