Graphic cards for OpenCL programming

OpenCL
1

Hello,

I am looking forward to buy a new graphic card to start OpenCL programming in linux.

  • Do I really need a pro cards? Cards like AMD RX 480 is very attractive with 8 GB RAM and good double-precision processing power. How much is this card is different from WX series.

What are other recommended cards for this purpose?

2

Pro advantages are way too subtle for a simple user: supposed extended support and warranty. Not worth a premium at all. Other alternative is Fury/Fury X. Both are powerhouses with beastly memory bandwidth, but 4 GB of framebuffer, higher price and power consumption make them iffy. NVIDIA’s not currently an option for any OpenCL development.

Also, I don’t know if that is a factor for you, but bear in mind that (current) gaming performance of RX 470 is quite similiar to that of RX 480 due to the lack of rasterisation units on the Polaris chip (which is irrelevant for OpenCL, of course).

3

Apart from programming I may do some photo editing. 10 bit color per channel is preferred but then I do not know how are things in linux for photo editing.