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

in my experience:

• if you want best absolute performance then you need to see who is on the latest hardware iteration, and use their stack (including latest / beta releases).

• if you want the best performance for the money you will be aiming at gamer cards rather than "professional" cards and the flexibility of targetting different platforms favors opencl.

• if you are starting out, in particular, cuda tends to be more polished and have more tools and libraries.

finally, my personal take, after appalling "support" from nvidia (we got a dead tesla and it wasn't changed for months, while a client was waiting): the flexibility to jump ship with opencl is worth the risk of slightly lower performance when nvidia are ahead in the release cycle.