Recommended GPUs for Tensorflow

Question

I understand that Tensorflow requires (for GPU computation) a GPU with Nvidia Compute Capability >= 3.0. There are many such GPUs to choose from. The gaming oriented GPUs, e.g. GeForce models, are much less expensive than the compute-oriented models, e.g. Tesla. My limited undertanding is that the compute-oriented models may lack video output (not needed for computation) and that the gaming models may be doing 32-bit math instead of 64. Assuming that Tensorflow uses (or prefers) 64-bit, does this mean that the gaming models will not work or will produce deficient results if used with Tensorflow? What attributes should one look for in choosing a GPU to use with Tensorflow?

Answer 1

The GPU-enabled version of TensorFlow has the following requirements:

• 64-bit Linux
• Python 2.7
• NVIDIA CUDA® 7.5 (CUDA 8.0 required for Pascal GPUs)
• NVIDIA cuDNN v4.0 (minimum) or v5.1 (recommended)

TensorFlow GPU support requires having a GPU card with NVidia Compute Capability >= 3.0. Supported cards include but are not limited to:

• NVidia Titan
• NVidia Titan X
• NVidia K20
• NVidia K40

You can see their official docs Tensorflow GPU support

Answer 2

Gaming GPUs can work quite well. You want a very recent GPU with lots of memory and CUDA cores. Most people training neural nets these days on GPU use 32 bit floats.