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

My experience in evaluating OpenCL floating point performance tends to favor NVIDIA cards. I've worked with a couple of floating point benchmarks on NVIDIA cards ranging from the 8600M GT to the GTX 460. NVIDIA cards consistently achieve about half of theoretical single-precisino peak on these benchmarks.
The ATI cards I have worked with rarely achieve better than one third of single-precision peak. Note that my experience with ATI is skewed; I've only been able to work with one 5000 series card. My experience is mostly with HD 4000 series cards, which were never well supported. Support for the HD 5000 series cards is much better.