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piotreh
Adept I

Which GPU should we buy?

Hi,

we are doing some research about the GPU. We will try to implement

some algorithms on the GPU. We do not know yet if the algorithms

really fit for the GPU architecture.

I did some research back in the year 2009 using a FireStream 9250

with Brook+, but I noticed this model does not exist anymore.

So what is a good card for GPU computing these days? Maybe we do not

need the  most expensive one.

And do we need two cards? One for GPU computing and one for the

usage of the monitor. I remember 2009 the driver crashed many times

doing GPU computing.

Thanks for your help,

Piotre

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1 Solution
himanshu_gautam
Grandmaster

Certainly a card with GCN architecture(HD 7970 is awesome) is recommended. You can also look into recent APU offering in case you are interested. There should be equivalent to 7970 on firestream line, but not aware of it.

No need to have an extra card, for display purpose, rather incase you are running non-graphical applications, no need of a display altogether

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himanshu_gautam
Grandmaster

Certainly a card with GCN architecture(HD 7970 is awesome) is recommended. You can also look into recent APU offering in case you are interested. There should be equivalent to 7970 on firestream line, but not aware of it.

No need to have an extra card, for display purpose, rather incase you are running non-graphical applications, no need of a display altogether

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Thanks for the info! We bought a 7970 from Asus!

Just now I ran the bolt example "BoltIntro" with increased INPUT_SIZE of 10000000 and the display

turns off and turns on again for a short time. And a message in the Windows Taskbar diplays: "Driver recovered".

Is the input size too big?

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yes. if your kernel takes more than 5 seconds to execute windows watchdog kicks in and restart GPU. it is recomended keeping kernel execution under one second.

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That is easy said. How I know in advance how long the kernel execution needs? This was only a sample from AMD using the bolt library with increased dataset. Maybe ourlater program has to use even more data. This makes the Bolt Library already a No-Go for our project.

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I suggest you to take up BOLT issues in bolt-specific category. Anyways, every sample will fail for some large input size, so you need to make sure, your buffers do not require more memory than is available. Also windows will have this watchdog timer to reset the GPU. It can be disabled (but is not recommended).

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Which version of Bolt are you using? Bolt 1.0 from AMD website should able able to take this load easily.

I can easily run 32 million (33554432) elements on the inclusive-scan on Cayman without getting driver restarts....

It hardly takes 30ms to compelete the inclusive scan...

(alternatively, I have seen driver restarts with older version pre1.0 version of Bolt even with a very small amount)

I aint too sure what algorithm boltIntro runs...But I presume it to be much simpler than an incl scan.

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chevydevil
Adept II

Or, if you want to use the GPU for computing only there is no sense in plugin a monitor in it. Buy a second GPU(a really small one, also from AMD for driver reasons) or use the integrated GPU of your CPU (if it has one) for displaying your desktop.

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