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ericcarroll
Adept I

AMD for OpenCL GPGPU, NVIDIA for GPU on Linux?

I am investigating using AMD 7970 for a OpenCL compute engine, while maintaining my current nVIDIA graphics card for GPU rendering. I am using Linux, not Windows (ubuntu 12.10 64 bit to be specific, and Linux 3.5). I understand that neither of the open source drivers support OpenCL quite yet. I want the proprietary NVIDIA driver for GPU performance.

For clarity, I don't have any interest in OpenGL/OpenCL interoperability between the cards in this configuration. I don't plan on using the 7970 as a GPU at all, it would be solely a compute engine.

It seems to be possible to use AMD for GPU, and nVIDIA for GPGPU by installing flgrx first, and then telling the nVIDIA installer not to overwrite the OpenGL stack. But I want to do the reverse.

  1. Can the AMD & NVIDIA drivers be co-resident in the kernel? I don't have a resounding yes in the postings i have seen so far.
  2. How do I end up with the NVIDIA openGL stack and not the AMD OpenGL/X stack?
    • Is there any way to get the AMD installer to install in a different location?
  3. Is there an AMD equivalent to this posting from NVIDIA that lists all the components installed?

I have seen comments in this forum from May 2012 that AMD is working on decoupling the OpenCL from X on Linux. This would be a great thing, because AMD seems to have the lead in compute engine price/performance right now. But its really hard to figure out how to run a mixed vendor Linux system. Not having to worry about X for AMD OpenCL would be a big win.

Any help would be appreciated.

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