  Commodity video-gaming hardware (consoles, graphics cards, tablets, etc.)
performance has been advancing at a rapid pace owing to strong consumer demand
and stiff market competition. Gaming hardware devices are currently amongst the
most powerful and cost-effective computational technologies available in
quantity. In this article, we evaluate a sample of current generation
video-gaming hardware devices for scientific computing and compare their
performance with specialized supercomputing general purpose graphics processing
units (GPGPUs). We use the OpenCL SHOC benchmark suite, which is a measure of
the performance of compute hardware on various different scientific application
kernels, and also a popular public distributed computing application,
Einstein@Home in the field of gravitational physics for the purposes of this
evaluation.
