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Post subject: [SOLVED]Radeon 4870 or GTX 260 for linux?
 Posted: Oct 06, 2008 - 04:10 AM
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Joined: Jun 02, 2008
Posts: 69
Location: Sunnyvale, CA
Status: Offline
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I'm building a new rig fairly soon, and I was wondering which one I should purchase. When the radeon 4870 first came out, it was cheaper, and matched the speed of the GTX 260, even surpassing it in some cases. However, the prices on the GTX 200 series cards have plummeted, and on newegg I can get a GTX 260 for as little as $200 after mail-in rebates, compared to $245 for the 4870. Prices aside, I've fiddled around with programming a little bit, and I want to get more serious about it. Something that interests me is CUDA for the Nvidia cards, because I know that if you have the right type of problem, that problem can be solved on a GPU tens to hundreds of time faster than a
CPU. Anyways, my concerns are these:
Price: self explanatory
Programmability: I would like to be able to develop number crunching applications that utilize the GPU
Openness: if you use linux, most of the time you don't just use it, you live it. In the spirit of openness, I would like to support a company that supports openness. I am a little concerned about Nvidia reserving SLI for it's expensive nForce boards, whereas ATI allows for Crossfire on chipsets not made by them
Driver support: I know that Nvidia has decent support for Linux. I don't know what the situation is for ATI/AMD.
All these issues considered, which one should I go for. Does ATI/AMD have something similiar to CUDA? |
Last edited by brawnyman713 on Oct 10, 2008 - 05:41 PM; edited 1 time in total
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Post subject: RE: Radeon 4870 or GTX 260 for linux?
Posted: Oct 06, 2008 - 10:26 AM
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Joined: Dec 04, 2006
Posts: 549
Status: Offline
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No idea about CUDA so far, but AFAIK there must be something like that because i don't think ATI would be dumb enough to let Nvidia alone with such an advantage.
The Chips aren't less capable of number crunching at all.
The "openness" is a bit tricky in this case. Nvidia has comparably good Linux drivers, but they are far from being open. They're simply binary blobs who taint the kernel.
ATIs own drivers the same story, but genreally AFAIK the quality is not on par with Nvidias.
However, there are opensource drivers for both chips, supplied by xorg but they mostly do not support the latest chipsets.
ATI announced to open their specs for Deelopers to write proper Opensource-drivers, but i'm unsure how much they already did.
Nvidia officially says that they will not provide opensource-drivers as such are not necessary/wanted in their opinion.
So unfortunately it seems like an antagonism these days to have Open drivers and support for the latest HW and features.
At least ATI does not argue against open drivers as much as nvidia does.
greetings,
me |
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Post subject:
Posted: Oct 07, 2008 - 03:39 PM
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Joined: Apr 06, 2008
Posts: 28
Status: Offline
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Before you make any decisions, check out Phoronix. They seem to have the best video hardware coverage on the web for linux users.
In past years, I am sure everyone who ran linux would automatically pick nvidia cards, but it is not so clear anymore. AMD has made great strides in driver development in the past year alone. |
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Post subject:
Posted: Oct 10, 2008 - 05:40 PM
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Joined: Jun 02, 2008
Posts: 69
Location: Sunnyvale, CA
Status: Offline
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| Well, I just went out and bought a 9800GT for my current build. It was $150, and I was very satisfied with it. I think I'll save $300 and just use the 9800GT in my new build. Thanks for the advice, though. |
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Post subject:
Posted: Oct 10, 2008 - 06:19 PM
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Joined: Aug 01, 2008
Posts: 38
Location: Bergen, Norway
Status: Offline
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| I know this topic is solved, but just for confirmation. I recently built a new computer. And my 9800GTX+ is working very good with both nvidia's driver and smxi. Though sidux is one of the few distros that has been successfully installed on my system. |
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