Quadro FX 5600 or Geforce 8800 Ultra ?

Accelerated Computing CUDA CUDA Programming and Performance
1

Hi all,

Is there really a performance difference between two GPUs , one professionnal Quadro and a 8 series Geforce ?

I mean, if each one has the same number of multiprocessor. Does the compute capabilities(1.0 or 1.1) make the difference?

I have to buy of CUDA enabled CPU and I’m quite lost between :wacko: :

  • a Quadro FX 5600 (much more expensive :) )
  • a Geforce 8800 Ultra
  • a Tesla

Larry

2

I think all of these are compute 1.0

The Ultra will be the fastest one I think.

3

Oups you are right about that :)

What does justify the price gap between them then? :wacko: The Quadro is really more expensive.

4

I believe the answer NVIDIA will give you is:

  • Quadro receives more testing before leaving the factory.
  • Quadro has support for maya, lightwave, etc.
  • Quadro has more memory (up to 1.5 Gb).
5

i would say neither, get a 9800GTX instead,should offer all the power u will need,

6

I believe the memory bandwidth of an Ultra is quite higher than the 9800GTX. Therefore in raw computing power it is probably the better choice.

The 9800GTX is a smart move if you:

  • want to move data from/to GPU while doing calculations
  • want to use atomic operations
7

I didnt even know they still sold 8800Ultras :o

Anyways as an owner of one i can tell you right now you wont run into a game that it cant handle, except for crysis.

Since i’ve gotten mine i’ve been easily able to max out every game i’ve thrown at it, except for crysis. But on crysis i can still run Very High settings 1440x900 2xAA and get decent 30 to 40 fps.

Decisions up to you i just thought i’d throw in some info External Image

8

The 9800 GTX has a higher shader clock rate than the 8800 GTX Ultra, while being a lot cheaper. So the 9800 GTX is also a good choice if you know your CUDA kernels are compute bound rather than memory bound.

9

Thanks for your answers :)
I think I’ll take the 9800GTX.

Finally, for CUDA developpers Quadro products are not a good choice ? I mean given the ratio Performance/Price

Larry

10

If performance/price is the major concern, then you can’t beat the game cards. If memory capacity (1.5 GiB vs 512MiB) and stability over days long calculations are more important, then go Tesla. I would only go Quadro if you really need the workstation class graphics support that it provides.

11

Another thing to look for is if you need display and DirectX/OpenGL output support.

If you happen to work on CUDA for visualization, or you intend to render the final output of your computation on screen (like RayTracing), then Tesla won’t really help you since it doesn’t support that kind of thing.

As far as CUDA is concerned, to be able to utilize ‘true’ stream processing capabilities wherein you are able to asynchronously copy data to and from the GPU while a kernel is executing, you may want to get a Card with Compute 1.1 - which is available only on the 9800’s in the performance bracket that you are looking at.

With all these in mind, I would recommend the 9800GTX…