CUDA or OpenCL

Community Community & Industry Discussion
1

Hi, I’m new in this commuity and in gamedev too.

I will upgrade my graphic card but I dunno if I should take a nVidia one, or AMD.

Which support UE offers ? CUDA or OpenCL ? Which brand would be a better acquire here ?

2

Generally people prefer Nvidia

But the things you’re concerned about are don’t apply to UE4.

3

Nvidia GPUs tend to work better with applications like Maya and 3ds Max. There’s also a few CUDA accelerated 3d apps like Xnormal and 3dcoat, but there’s not that many. Nvidia has done a bit more with VR, but in general, UE4 isn’t biased one way or another.

4

CUDA only works in Nvidia graphics. CUDA is more intuitive and has a faster development that OpenCL.

5

I beg to differ.

There’s a ton of AMD hate for reasons beyond me.

My AMD 290x works wonders compared to the NVIDIA cards I’ve had (8800, 660ti, 780ti).

It’s night and day. There is no lack of performance and truthfully I don’t believe Nvidia Cards run 3ds Max/Maya more efficiently.
It all comes down to the card you have. If you have a powerful AMD card, applications will run just as well (if not better) than a Nvidia card.
The program doesn’t detect manufacturers, it detects what’s important the power of the card, when you try and push it past the capabilities of the card, the program and card will falter whether it be made by AMD or Nvidia.

~ Jason

6

I’ve just switched from AMD to Nvidia as my Radeon was really outdated. Personally, I would go for Nvidia for the sole reason they are being quite active in UE4 integration. They have even created a UE4 branch with waveworks built in.

7

I wasn’t claiming that Maya and Max have better performance, but I have noticed a strong trend that ATI/AMD GPUs tend (at least in the past) to have a lot more viewport bugs or glitches. I know plenty of people that refuse to use ATI/AMD cards because of driver issues and experiences in the past, it’s probably not enough to suggest that you never buy them, but it has created biases.

Here’s 2 random examples of the types of glitches I’ve seen, but I’m sure you could find similar bugs or glitches for Nvidia as well. There’s really no scientific or accurate way to say which one has more issues.
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=101534
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=75743

8

My old radeon card was giving me a lot of headaches too. It was one of the best when i bought it. (Radedon 4850) I ran a lot of problem both with some nvidia optimized games and 3d applications like 3ds max and modo. I checked modo forums and a lot of people were sending crash reports because of radeon cards. My last 2 cards are nvidia and i didn’t have any problem with any 3d application or game engine. I don’t say amd cards are bad, but they have bad support on drivers with 3d applications and most of the people knows that. It’s not hate :slight_smile: Amd cards are better for price/performance, but buy an nvidia if you can afford it.