NVIDIA or ATI?

ginopiazza49ginopiazza49
Posted:
in Current Mac Hardware edited January 2014
As reported on TUAW, and MacRumor, they believe that the upcoming MacBooks will indeed be powered by NVIDIA chipsets. As stated, the move would also prepare Apple?s laptops for the release of Mac OS X Snow Leopard which will allow applications to utilize the more powerful graphics processing units.



I will be purchasing a MacPro in the near future. Would I be better off opting for a NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT 512MB graphics card (which is $150.00 extra), instead of the standard ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT 256MB graphics card?

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 1
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,322moderator
    From what I can see, only the Firestream ATI cards are compatible with the stream SDK so when OpenCL comes around, the HD 2600 XT might not be programmable to the extent that's useful or possibly not at all via OpenCL. The 8800 GT most certainly is as it fully supports CUDA.



    The Nvidia chip is a far safer bet when it comes to future-proofing your machine.



    Here for example is a benchmark of the 8800GT using Elemental's GPU encoder:



    http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3374&p=5



    It is twice as fast as a Core 2 Quad 2.66GHz. Using it in conjunction with your CPU is an impressive boost. Right now you can only use it via CUDA but you can't use ATI cards at all right now unless you buy the high end expensive models.



    So ATI -> can't use it now for anything except games and 3D and will likely not support OpenCL in future

    Nvidia -> faster at games and 3d, supports CUDA now and will fully support OpenCL in 8 months or so.
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