Yet somehow AMD manages to consistently offer better hardware (wrt double floating point performance) for a lower price. I'm sure it's because the fine folks at AMD are silicon wizards and not because of NVIDIA's cozy monopoly position due to shrewd marketing of CUDA + their early-mover advantage in academic markets.
Absolutely true, but there's better overlap between tooling required for the game industry and tooling required for academic compute than there is between the respective hardware (double vs single (or lower) float performance).
Yes, it's hard to justify a 48bit fpu or 64bit fpu when you can have 1.5x or 2x the number of computing units (approximately)
Still, "not as fast as we wanted" is a "modern researcher problem" ;) Some years ago they would have been converting it to run in integers so that it's not unbelievably slow.
I already mentioned why that wasn't feasible. I'm pretty much stuck paying $100 extra on each card in exchange for my predecessors' "free" CUDA lessons.
My point isn't that the economic tradeoff mentioned by the sales rep doesn't exist, my point is that the tradeoff can't be responsible for a price grade as steep as the one we see NVIDIA use. The real answer as to why they price-grade so heavily is "because they can" -- not that I would expect a sales rep to be honest about it.
