NVIDIA GT 120 or ATI 4870 in future use for parallel processing with Snow Leopard

[schlinde]

Hello everyone,

in light of the imminent arrival of Snow Leopard (6 Months max.) and its announced ability to use the graphic cores for parallel processing, which one of the available graphic cards would you choose with the new Mac Pro? Is OpenCL or CUDA related to this question? I will use the workstation mainly for scientific calculations (Matlab).

Any thoughts? Thanks
Peter

 

[Gonk42]

Hello everyone,

in light of the imminent arrival of Snow Leopard (6 Months max.) and its announced ability to use the graphic cores for parallel processing, which one of the available graphic cards would you choose with the new Mac Pro? Is OpenCL or CUDA related to this question? I will use the workstation mainly for scientific calculations (Matlab).

Any thoughts? Thanks
Peter

I've been thinking about this. It is slightly strange that Apple have not included a graphics card with more RAM for this purpose, maybe they'll release one later. CUDA is Nvidia's system whilst Apple is going for a more open system which should work with either card. If you're doing parallel processing on it, it makes sense to get a second card anyway so I don't think the decision now is critical.

 

[chewietobbacca]

RAM isn't what does GPGPU computations, it's the shaders, which theoretically the 4850 would be superior by 2x

 

[Boneoh]

Parallel processing

Does Matlab currently have support for CUDA? If so, that implies that the NVidia card would be a better choice in the short haul.

Longer term, I suspect that OpenCL will be the way to go, since it is an open specification that will be adopted by many players. The problem may be waiting for Snow Leopard to arrive and then Matlab to implement OpenCl.

By the way, what kinds of processing are you looking at?

I do financial modeling, etc.

EDIT:

I just checked and found that Matlab does have a plugin for CUDA. FFT performance is 14X !!!

http://www.beyond3d.com/content/news/342


Please post back with your experiences, I recently started looking at Matlab and am also interested in parallel processing, more in what Grand Central and OpenCL have in store for us.