NVIDIA vs AMD: GPGPU performance

Question

I\'d like to hear from people with experience of coding for both. Myself, I only have experience with NVIDIA.

NVIDIA CUDA seems to be a lot more popular than the competi

Answer 1

I am new to GPGPU but I have some experience in scientific computing (PhD in Physics). I am putting together a research team and I want to go towards using GPGPU for my calculations. I had to choose between the available platforms. I decided on Nvidia, for a couple of reasons: while ATI might be faster on paper, Nvidia has a more mature platform and more documentation so it will be possible to get closer to the peak performance on this platform.

Nvidia also has an academic research support program, one can apply for support, I just received a TESLA 2075 card which I am very happy about. I don't know if ATI or Intel supports research this way.

What I heard about OpenCL is that it's trying to be everything at once, it is true that your OpenCL code will be more portable but it's also likely to not exploit the full capabilities of either platform. I'd rather learn a bit more and write programs that utilize the resources better. With the TESLA K10 that just came out this year Nvidia is in the 4.5 TeraFlops range so it is not clear that Nvidia is behind ... however Intel MICs could prove to be a real competitor, especially if they succeed in moving the GPGPU unit to the motherboard. But for now, I chose Nvidia.