Hi,
I’m looking to get started with CUDA, and before I pull out the credit card and order the GPU I’d like to make sure I’ve got everything covered. I’ve had a fair amount of experience with math programming, Unix, Linux, etc., but none with graphics programming. I won’t be doing any “traditional” graphics programming with this card, just number crunching. Truth is, about the only thing I really know about graphics cards is how to plug 'em into expansion slots … :">
The PC I’m planning to do this with uses an AMD Phenom 9600 quad core CPU (2.3 GHz). OS is Slackware 12.2, kernel is 2.6.27.7-smp. 2 GB RAM. The card I’m thinking of buying is the Sparkle GeForce GTX 260+ Core 216:
[url=“http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=4405946&CatId=3775”]http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/Se...&CatId=3775[/url]
A bit on the pricey side, but I need double precision floats, which means I need “compute capability 1.3,” and from the list in App. A of “NVIDIA CUDA Programming Guide 2.3,” it looks like I’m stuck with that expense.
Anyway, here’s what I’ve done so far. Downloaded the NVIDIA Driver; the CUDA Toolkit; and the CUDA SDK. (latest versions of everything) Slackware wasn’t on the list of OSes, so I used the Redhat Enterprise 5.x versions.
Everything installed fine. The NVIDIA Driver installed even though there’s no NVIDIA card (right now) in the machine – I suppose that’s no problem. I ran make for the SDK with the emulation option (“make emu=1”). The test programs ran ok , reported that everything had passed.
So … are there other things I need to check for my OS and hardware? Or can I go ahead and order the card? Many thanks,
SAM