GPU perfomance request, what's the best solution?

I work on an audio processing project that needs to do a lot of basic computations (+, -, *) like a FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) calculation.

We're considering using a graphics card to acce开发者_开发问答lerate these computations. But we don't know if this is the best solution. Our desired solution needs to be a good computation system costing less than $500.

We use Matlab programming, and we have a sound card acquisition which have to be plug in the system.

Do you know a solution other than graphics card + motherboard to do lot of calculus?

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You can use the free Matlab CUDA library to perform the computations on the GPU. $500 will give you a very decent NVIDIA GPU. Beware that GPU's have limited video memory and will run out of memory with large data volumes even faster than Matlab.

I have benchmarked an 8core intel CPU against an 8800 Nvidia GPU (128streams) with GPUMat , for 512Kb datasets the GPU spun out at the same speed as the 8 core intel at 2Ghz, including transfer times to the GPU memory. For serious GPU work I recommend a dedicated card compared to the one you are using to drive the monitor. Use the motherboard cheapie intel video to drive the monitor and pass the array computes to the Nvidia.

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Parallel Computing Toolbox from MathWorks now includes GPU support. In particular, elementwise operations and arithmetic are supported, as well as 1- and 2-dimensional FFTs (along with a whole bunch of other stuff to support hand-written CUDA code if you have that). If you're interested in performing calculations in double-precision, the recent Tesla and Quadro branded cards will give you the best performance.

Here's a trivial example showing how you might use the GPU in MATLAB using Parallel Computing Toolbox:

gA = gpuArray( rand(1000) );
gB = fft( 1 + gA * 3 );