Hi Chris,
I'm projecting to get a new development system in the next year or so, which means about 6 months of planning before I buy something.
Wow, you're a very cautious consumer! :-)
I've been on Nvidia for the last few years, and have been mostly happy with the driver support, but I'm looking toward ATI/AMD again because NVidia's OpenCL 64-bit FPU performance is allegedly crippled in their latest consumer hardware, putting it in a severe disadvantage against rival parts from AMD: http://www.anandtech.com/show/2977/nvidia-s-geforce-gtx-480-and-gtx-470-6-months-late-was-it-worth-the-wait-/6
It may be useful to note that the GTX 480 and 470 are not the most recent generation of GPUs from nVidia, there are now the 5xx series. So the information in the above link may be outdated. Maybe it still applies, but it's worth checking out.
The other thing is if it's only slower for that particular feature, I wouldn't call that a severe disadvantage. It all depends on what you'll be doing with it. I have a GTX 470 at home, and it's very fast (at least compared to my GTX 260 at work, it's much faster).
My main concern with AMD/ATI is the poor quality of drivers I've experienced in past years. I run Win7/64 right now. Can anyone weigh in on the recent quality of these drivers?
I haven't directly used ATI cards lately. I have heard they've become much better, but still lagging behind nVidia, mostly with respect to OpenGL driver stability and performance. Perhaps someone here has used recent-generation and comparable cards from both and can better answer - that's pretty much the only way you'll be able to get that information.
Hope this helps, J-S -- ______________________________________________________ Jean-Sebastien Guay [email protected] http://www.cm-labs.com/ http://whitestar02.dyndns-web.com/ _______________________________________________ osg-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openscenegraph.org/listinfo.cgi/osg-users-openscenegraph.org
