I am a Computer Science Major at Merrimack College. I am in the senior seminar class on Parallel computing and I am a member of a 3 student team. We are tasked with an 1 hour long discussion on the possibilities of GP on GPUs.
First off: we have a small budget. However, we already have a PC w/o GPU. Pentium D 2.8GHz w/3GB RAM Fedora 10 OS. We are looking to get a GPU that would give us the best performance increase. We are eyeballing some of the 8 series.
Finally to my question.
What card should we use? What cards have you out used in different projects/purposes. We currently have no code/algorithms to test yet, we are just beginning to research this and want to get the card ASAP to begin testing because we have < 3 weeks to go and shipping will hold us up a bit.
If you can at all swing a GTX 260, you’ll get a more flexible and potent architecture with less headaches in programming. Programming and understanding the programming model is the main headache - with a GTX 260 you’ll have an easier time at the truly hard task.
Until the GTXes came, I used 8800 GT and GTS that worked very nicely with a good bang/buck ratio.
I second the recommendation of the 8800 GT with 512 MB of memory, which is now pretty much the 9800 GT. Nice little card, easy to get into a computer, and provides a reasonable acceleration. I use two of these at the moment for smaller jobs, in addition to the assortment of double-slot cards available to me. It does remarkably well.