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Okay its a long question title for sure.

I'm looking for a new video card (yes,SU is not a page for that, but wait). I've been a loyal NVidia customer ever since, now using a 8600gts. Old but still somewhat good, its a bit slow though. I want an upgrade because 8600gts wont support better vdpau and new features.

I checked out the prices and the documents, I would need a GTX260 card. Which costs ..well.. a lot. ATI performs much better for that price. (At least on every test it outperforms GTX260).

However, as far as I know there is no gpu accel with ATI. The things you can use is DXVA only, no other method. Could you correct me out there? Will be there a gpu accel for ATI also? Or is there one available? (DXVA is not bad, but kinda slow compared to NVIdia's CUDA.) What about openCL? How does ATI support that? (I'm talking about the 5850 ATI card at the minute, I would buy that instead of the NVidia.)

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  • Also. 1024mb of DDR3 or 512mb of DDR5 ? Which one would be better?
    – Apache
    Commented May 23, 2010 at 8:11

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XvBA is the ATI equivalent of VDPAU. Same restrictions apply: not all media player will use acceleration (libVA).

See the Stream SDK for OpenCL support. I haven't played with this, but general feeling is CUDA is more mature than OpenCL for GPGPU at the moment (though naturally limited by not being a vendor-neutral standard). On the other hand, as you say, ATI have the edge on performance right now.

I haven't seen a 58xx-series card outfitted with only 512MB RAM available.

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  • Ah the 512 vs 1024 mb ram is meant for GT240 NVidia. Its a cheaper card, but knows the CUDA features I want and I can add two in SLI if that is good. Uhm... XFX gives 1024mb DDR3, Zotac AMP! gives 512mb ddr5. Dunno which would be better.
    – Apache
    Commented May 23, 2010 at 10:20
  • Okay now checked out some ATI cards (since only 3xx and gt240 comes with VP4), 5770 is my choice so far. Guess I'll send all ATI engineers to hell not once and this will be one of the biggest mistakes in my life, but hey why not. :)
    – Apache
    Commented May 25, 2010 at 13:39
  • Heh. Yeah, the 57xx series is in a price/perf sweet spot at vendors where I am ATM. Drivers aren't the horror they once were either. Can't say I've done any GPGPU work though.
    – bobince
    Commented May 31, 2010 at 12:41

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