Who knows about graphics cards?

Myranda

I am building a computer... happy with all selections except the GPU...

Budget is around two hundred monies (with a little wiggle room).

Choices at that price range appear to be...

Nvidia GTX 660TI (which is sort of a 670, at least has the same shader count) £180 monies with a free game

AMD HD 7950 £215 monies with three free games.

The interesting dilema comes from a couple of contradictory factors..

The 660Ti is slightly faster for gaming... but I also want to do some GPU processing... for which the AMD is going to be faster (it's all down to the number of procesing units and the AMD has about 33% more)... hmm.

Oh, and the price difference between them would be enough to pay for a USB Alpha wireless adapter for doing packet injection a prelude to what the GPU processing is for... 

Hmm... things are never easy

monquixote

Tom's Hardware is usually good for questions of this type as is http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/

Myranda

I've tried asking specifically on the Kali Linux forum as that's what I'll be running when needing the GPU processing, and got no answer, asked on watercoolinguk.com and got one answer of "go AMD" and another "no AMD is useless" and no other answers...

I figured it was time for a curveball and rather than ask on a forum that made sense, I'd ask some music types

digitalscream

Your logic is almost correct apart from two things:

1 - GPU processing isn't all about shader count - it's about clock speed and memory bandwidth (and bus width, when you get lots of shaders wanting to access the memory simultaneously).

2 - Generally speaking, implementations of CUDA tend to be faster than OpenCL implementations in real-world applications. CUDA is only available with nVidia cards. If you use Sony Vegas, for example, there is no choice here - nVidia all the way.

Also, nVidia drivers have also seemed a lot more stable than AMD/ATi drivers to me.

I think it's pretty clear what I'm suggesting here

EDIT: I see you're using Linux...at which point, nVidia is the way forward. AMD drivers for Linux are horrifically bad and unstable. Even the nouveau drivers for nVidia are more stable than the closed-source AMD drivers.

Myranda

digitalscream said:

Your logic is almost correct apart from two things:

1 - GPU processing isn't all about shader count - it's about clock speed and memory bandwidth (and bus width, when you get lots of shaders wanting to access the memory simultaneously).

2 - Generally speaking, implementations of CUDA tend to be faster than OpenCL implementations in real-world applications. CUDA is only available with nVidia cards. If you use Sony Vegas, for example, there is no choice here - nVidia all the way.

Also, nVidia drivers have also seemed a lot more stable than AMD/ATi drivers to me.

I think it's pretty clear what I'm suggesting here

EDIT: I see you're using Linux...at which point, nVidia is the way forward. AMD drivers for Linux are horrifically bad and unstable. Even the nouveau drivers for nVidia are more stable than the closed-source AMD drivers.

Apparently its much the same maths as bitcoin mining, and according to the Bitcoin mining community  - for the type of maths done in PW cracking (all above board for learning purposes) or bitcoin mining the stream processor count makes a collossal difference. As such they've noticed that AMD does the job fasterer - more stream processors (and memory bandwidth at my price range).

Also, while AMD drivers might have a poor time of things on Linux in general I've not been reading amazing news about nVidia on backtrack or Kali (two totally different kernels and the same problem... joy!).

As for clock speed the card I'm looking at can clock (on air) to 1200mhz clock and 6300mhz memory which is faster than the 660Ti is capable of - with smaller bandwidth, lower stream processor count, and 33% less memmory... so stable or not, the AMD was the only real contender  

Also three free games does help...

TTony

Is this the right place to say that I remember when graphics cards started supporting colours?

Or that my first monitor displayed orangey-amber on a black background, rather than green-on-black.  Pushing the envelope ...

Myranda

My first computer plugged into a telly... and ran on tapes... *gulp* it had a 3.5mhz processor.. I've just ordered a CPU that has 4 3.5Ghz cores! 1000x faster, four times over *gulp* and then throw in all those stream processors and it's a ludicrous number of times more powerful...

That said, my first computer could do colours! I think 16 at anyone time!

Myranda

huh, just thought... 1000x faster processor isn't really very accurate.

8bit processor vs 64bit processor with a whole host of other improvements... so while 1000x more cycles per second is true... but it's more complicated than that... so... many faster.

TTony

Myranda said:

My first computer plugged into a telly... and ran on tapes... *gulp* it had a 3.5mhz processor.. I've just ordered a CPU that has 4 3.5Ghz cores! 1000x faster, four times over *gulp* and then throw in all those stream processors and it's a ludicrous number of times more powerful..
That said, my first computer could do colours! I think 16 at anyone time!

16 Colours??  You are but a computing child ...

Lucky you

I think I got my first "PC" in 1987.  It was one of the IBM XT clones.  8086, I think.  Maybe 80286.  I remember driving into London to collect it - I didn't trust a courier to deliver it.

A few years later, I remember spending Xmas day fitting a CD drive (which had cost something like £400) into a slightly later PC, and trying to get all the drivers working properly, just so that I could play 7th Guest. 

Myranda

I've had christmasses where most of the day was spent getting bits to work as planned...

CD drives were especially "fun"