Planning to buy AMD 5450 - Need Advice

[shywho]

I am not into gaming and generally buy Video Cards to do some programming as a hobby. I have a GeForce 9500 and was quite impressed by the CUDA offering from nVidia. Most of my programming has been on DirectX/CUDA, but I would not mind switching to OpenGL/OpenCL , provided I get good drivers. I have not experimented with PhysX. I now want to upgrade to 5450 as that should give me OpenGL4.0 and DX11. I would also need to keep the power and cooling requirements to 9500 levels.

Do you think the 5450 would be a good upgrade for my current requirements?

 

[Ken g6]

Um, did you know you can program OpenCL without a video card? I just did it for PrimeGrid (see my sig.) OpenCL on CPU generally seems to be about three times faster per core (when written right) than the CUDA emulator, and OpenCL can use all your CPU cores while the CUDA emulator could use only one.

As for the 5450, it's significantly limited. In CUDA terms, its warp size is halved. A 5570 would fit your power envelope and give you a lot more processing power to work with. A 4650 would also be good: it uses a little more power, for a little less processing, but it's cheaper.

P.S. Did you know there's a programming forum?