Latest Cuda 8 vs OpenCL - Titan X Pascal performance

Accelerated Computing CUDA CUDA Setup and Installation
#1

Hi,
Hoping someone can clear up my confusion.
Using this PPA to install what I think is the lastest Nvidia driver on my Ubuntu(mate) setup
ppa:graphics-drivers/ppa

Since any driver since 370.23 (beta) has support for the Titan X Pascal card I am wondering what advantage, if any, there is to install the latest CUDA toolkit on top of my driver install.?
I use primarrily Houdini which takes advantage of Open CL for simulations and also Redshift for GPU rendering.

#2

You shouldn’t need the CUDA toolkit for your workflow, I don’t think.

You’re welcome to do whatever you wish of course, but my recommendation would be to choose drivers published by NVIDIA, not from some third party archive.

#3

Thanks, but the advantage of using PPA’s AFAIK, is so your Linux installation doesn’t break with every kernel update. Important for Linux novices like myself.

#4

I was suggesting you use a driver from an NVIDIA archive, not from a 3rd party archive. You can still use packaged drivers, and you can still survive linux kernel updates with packaged drivers, AFAIK.

The NVIDIA driver is getting fairly complex (lots of modules) and not all modules are required for a given use-case.

I have seen some repository driver packages that include certain NVIDIA driver modules but not all of them, meaning the packaged driver doesn’t work for some use-cases. YMMV, as I said, use whatever you wish.