Choosing a Programmer's Video Card.

[tesseracter]

So i write games, and am making a nice computer at the moment. I'm aiming for near silence, custom mATX case, watercooling(cpu, or cpu/gpu--unsure) and going with a q9xxx processor.

Recently I have been toying with GPU particle systems, and would like to have a solid video card to work with for this. my budget is ~$250-$300. cuda seems like the way to go.

Im working on a P5E-mv mobo, and I was wondering if the 98xx series with PCIe 2.0 x16 works on the mobo with PCIe x16, and if so, do the bandwidth limitations pose any difficulty?

What card seems best for my needs of quiet(air or watercooled(watercooling would cost quite a bit more tho)), programmable card, and budget? explainations are better than just telling me what to get.

 

[killerbobjr]

Cuda is a gpgpu interface to nVidia cards. Are you going to be doing gpgpu programming? If so then you also need to be aware of an architectural limitation of the G8x-G9x series (and Cuda) in that only 16KB of memory is available globally for each thread on the card. If you have for instance, a 16MB data set that you need to pass from one thread to another, you will have to page the data 16KB at a time (assuming the entire 16KB is not being used at the moment) to the other thread -- you will need to make 1000 transfers every time you need to transfer that data to another thread. That's a severe architectural limitation. It's also why I bought an ATI 3870 which doesn't have that problem. The officially supported gpgpu interface for ATI cards is Brook, which adds another layer of programmer complexity for gpgpu applications. However I'll take complexity over a brain dead architecture any day.

If you are going to be doing straight graphics programming, then it's a tossup between an nVidia 8800 GTS 512MB and the ATI HD 3870, both with a fanless heat sink:

For OpenGL programming, nVidia's drivers win hands down with better implementation.

For DirectX 9 only, again nVidia wins on performance.

For DirectX 10, ATI has a slightly better implementation, but nVidia still wins easily on performance, unless you overclock -- then an overclocked ATI can beat an overclocked nVidia with very easy-to-get high, fanless, overclocks.

If you intend to do any DirectX 10.1 programming, then ATI is your only choice.