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openclgpugpgpuamd-processor
kdog
kdog

Reputation: 1645

Getting started with GP GPU?

I have two basic questions about getting started with GPGPU programming:

(1) If I do GPGPU on my Mac, will it affect the image on the monitor? How do I know the windowing system or other programs output is not competing for the GPU?

(2) Is there a way to try out AMD GPU programming somewhere without buying a high-end graphics card? The rental cloud places I have seen all use Nvidia. My computation would be logical integer (bit-twiddling) compute-bound, and I have read that AMD GPU is better for these applications.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 197

Answers (1)

Augusto
Augusto

Reputation: 29997

1) It won't affect the image on the monitor. And to check if another process is using the GPU you'll need something like AMD System Monitor for mac (this application only works on Windows)

2) Any radeon HD 4xxx and above supports OpenCL (previous card might support this, but I'm not sure). This mean any new AMD card you can buy, including the cheapest ones support OpenCL.

The difference between the expensive cards and the cheap ones is the number of stream processors. For example

  • Radeon HD 4350: 80 stream processors
  • Radeon x290: 2560 stream processors

Upvotes: 1

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