What PC hardware is needed to try out GPU programming?

Question

I am interested to try out GPU programming. One thing not clear to me is, what hardware do I need? Is it right any PC with graphics card is good? I have very little knowledge of GPU programming, so the starting learning curve is best not steep. If I have to make a lot of hacks just in order to run some tutorial because my hardware is not good enough, I'd rather to buy a new hardware.

I have a retired PC (~10 year old) installed with Ubuntu Linux, I am not sure what graphics card it has, must be some old one.

I am also planning to buy a new sub-$500 desktop which to my casual research normally has AMD Radeon 7x or Nvidia GT 6x graphics card. I assume any new PC is good enough for the programming learning.

Anyway any suggestion is appreciated.

Answer 1

If you want to use CUDA, you'll need a GPU from NVidia, and their site explains the compute capabilities of their different products.

If you want to learn OpenCL, you can start right now with an OpenCL implementation that has a CPU back-end. The basics of writing OpenCL code targeting CPUs or GPUs is the same, and they differ mainly in performance tuning.

For GPU programming, any AMD or NVidia GPU made in the past several years will have some degree of OpenCL support, though there have been some new features introduced with newer generations that can't be easily emulated for older generations.

Intel's integrated GPUs in Ivy Bridge and later support OpenCL, but Intel only provides a GPU-capable OpenCL implementation for Windows, not Linux.

Also be aware that there is a huge difference between a mid-range and high-end GPU in terms of compute capabilities, especially where double-precision arithmetic is supported. Some low-end GPUs don't support double-precision at all, and mid-range GPUs often perform double-precision arithmetic 24 times slower than single-precision. When you want to do a lot of double-precision calculations, it's absolutely worth it to get a compute-oriented GPU (Radeon 7900 series or GeForce Titan and up).

If you want a low-end system with a non-trivial GPU power, you best bet at the moment is probably to get a system built around an AMD APU.