CUDA Differences b/w Architectures and Compute Capability

Since its first release back in year 2007 with compute capability 1.0, CUDA has three more architectural releases and eight more compute capabilities which marks the fact that it’s an ever evolving architecture. Although CUDA is forward compatible but every new release comes with its own new features worth using and an increased thread/memory support. As a rule of thumb every new architecture runs the CUDA code faster than previous generation given both cards have same number of cores.

The comparison below gives a list of feature/functionality support between compute capabilities of NVIDIA’s CUDA enabled devices. Note that atomic operations weren’t supported in the first release and since they are so important, NVIDIA now practically compares architectures from 1.1 and later.

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NVIDIA CUDA: Kepler Vs. Fermi Architecture

The era of the next-generation graphics is finally upon us. If you’ve been hankering after a graphics card upgrade lately and wanted to see what NVIDIA’s reply to AMD’s Radeon HD 7970 is, wait no further. The green squad has taken the cloaks off of their GeForce GTX 680, a new piece of graphics silicon targeted at consumers and the enthusiast mob based on its latest Kepler architecture. NVIDIA claims that its new GTX 680 is the fastest and most power-efficient GPU ever made offering significant performance enhancements over its rivals.

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