AMD unleashes the Cayman-based FirePro V5900 and V7900
primesuspect
Beepin n' BoopinDetroit, MI Icrontian
primesuspect
Beepin n' BoopinDetroit, MI Icrontian
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When you go to design a GPU, you have a specific thermal power draw you want to target. Let's say it's 300W. All the components on the board have to be orchestrated in just such a way that the board doesn't draw more than that in most cases, but applications like Furmark and OCCT are an engineer's worst nightmare: they easily push any GPU without powertune past their envelope.
They push things past their envelope because they do something that no game would ever do: run the clockspeed up to maximum, then run every single shader/SIMD at maximum capacity. It's completely unrealistic, but people use these tools, and you have to deal with them.
So, in the past, you really had two options:
1) Design the card with clockspeeds so low that apps like OCCT and Furmark don't push the GPU past its envelope, or...
2) Overengineer the shit out of the card so it can survive prolonged operation well past the targeted envelope.
#1 robs the consumer of performance in games, and #2 would make graphics cards incredibly expensive. So you have to strike a balance between under-specing and over-engineering, and hope that the public doesn't design an app that rakes your gamble over the coals.
In sweeps PowerTune, which intelligently locks the card at its targeted envelope. What happens when you can now guarantee--with very little additional hardware engineering--that your card is safely protected from long stints beyond spec?
You can raise the maximum clockspeed! This means everyday games and applications can benefit from a <i>much</i> higher maximum clockspeed. Does that performance come at the expense of soul-crushing apps like Furmark and OCCT? Yes, it does. But if you bought a GPU to run Furmark all day, maybe you need to reconsider your priorities.
Let me give you a real scenario:
The AMD Radeon HD 6990 shipped with an 830MHz clockspeed. If AMD didn't have PowerTune to protect the card from those outlier apps, then we would have had to ship the card in the low 600MHz range to make sure that the thermal output of the card at full blast didn't damage the hardware.
Now look at the GTX 590, which still uses the "hurrdurr board hot cut clockspeeds" method. What frequency did it ship at? 607MHz.
PowerTune was directly responsible for giving more performance to the gamer in the 6900 Series, and now AMD's FirePro lineup can do the same for DCC users.
It's awesome.
I seem to remember this conversation.
haha, yep. Discussed over beers and a game of Dominion in the ICHQ garage.
The flow was something like this:
Geohancement>GeoBoost>GeometryBoost.
Thanks for the feedback, Dave!
Did you say you'd run SPEC benches? Or have they already been done elsewhere?
If this card did game worth a hoot I would use it at home as well. :bigggrin:
I question whether Adobe will drop CUDA support for MPE once they release OpenCL support, since Quadro Cards also support OpenCL; or if they will give people with CUDA supported cards the option to choose to between CUDA and OpenCL.