AMD Radeon vs NVIDIA cards

[juandaza]

Hello,

I'm getting a GPU to start using the beagle-library with Beast and Mrbayes. I have two options: an AMD Radeon HD 7870 2GB GDDR5 or a NVIDIA Geforce GT620 1GB DDR3. I want to know which one is better and easier to set up in Beast and mrbayes.

Sorry if this is a naive question but this will be the first time I use the beagle-library for phylogenetics.

Thanks

Juan

[Andrew Rambaut]

Dear Juan,

Firstly, the AMD Radeon will probably not be usable with BEAGLE (there was an OpenCL implementation that may work if you can find OpenCL drivers for this board but I am not sure of the status of this). Secondly, the NVIDIA GT620 will work with BEAGLE. Looking at the specs:

http://www.geforce.com/hardware/desktop-gpus/geforce-gt-620/specifications

...it has 96 CUDA cores which is at the low-end for BEAGLE. This won't give you the sort of speed ups we reported in the papers. A rough guess is that this will be about 50% to 100% faster than the same analysis on the CPU (assuming that you have reasonably long sequences which is when you get the greatest benefit of GPUs.

It would be useful to get some benchmarks for some of these cards:

http://beast.bio.ed.ac.uk/Benchmarks

Andrew

[Udayan]

Hello,

I was wondering if anyone performed Benchmarks with BEAGLE 2.0 on any of the AMD cards (since the last post)? We are in the process of upgrading hardware and I was wondering if I should take the leap towards OpenCL in buying a SAPPHIRE HD 7950 3GB GDDR5 MAC Edition or stick with NVidia GeForce GTX680 for Mac (CUDA implimentation).

Any input will be highly appreciated!

-Udayan

[Daniel L. Ayres]

Hi Udayan,

I haven't benchmarked those two GPU's specifically but in general AMD cards perform better for larger problem sizes. If you have over 10,000 unique site patterns in your alignment then the AMD might perform better than the NVIDIA card (though perhaps not significantly better to justify a new purchase if you already have the GTX680). 

Cheers,

Daniel

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[Udayan]

Thanks Daniel, Really appreciate it. Will stick to the NVIDIA card as I'm working with much smaller unique site patterns.

Cheers,

Udayan