Stream processors? ATI Nvidia?

Discussion in 'Hardware' started by outlawaol, 25 Sep 2008.

  1. wyx087

    wyx087 Homeworld 3 is happening!!

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    and was that a worthy upgrade??

    do you Fold, btw
     
  2. Tim S

    Tim S OG

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    I think the upgrade was well worth it - I've gone from struggling to play games like Crysis, to playing them really well at my screen's native res (1680x1050).

    I don't fold - most of my home computing is done on a notebook these days and my gaming PC is pretty much just that. Occasionally, I use it for watching DVDs if someone else is using the AV setup downstairs and it's something I don't want to watch, but that's not particularly often. I have done some brief messing around with the folding clients in the office though and I've found that the Nvidia one does appear to be faster... If I was a folder, it would've been a harder choice for me - I probably would've gone for a 280 in fact.
     
  3. Tim S

    Tim S OG

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    What subjects were you thinking of?

    We've covered RV770/GT200 in quite a bit of technical depth, and I've also gone to town on DirectX 11 recently - there's more to come on DX11 actually, following a pretty interesting (for me, at least) interview I did with Corrinne Yu, who is one of the most switched on girls I've had the pleasure of talking to. She's thinking about five years ahead of me. She's not Carmack or Sweeney, but she's right up there with them in many people's opinions and was recently recruited by Microsoft to be principle engine programmer for the Halo series.

    Aside from that, I've got plans to hit up OpenCL once the specs are finalised as well, but I'm not quite sure when that's going to be. There will also be a fairly detailed analysis of Nehalem when it's close to launch as well, fwiw.

    And I've been wanting to write something about Larrabee, but nobody wants to answer any of my questions about the architecture. That makes writing a piece a little pointless at the mo', because I'd just be parroting Intel's SIGGRAPH paper and marketing guff, rather than getting to the bottom of some of the really interesting choices that have been made.

    We enjoy writing those articles, but it's a matter of what, where and when you want us to hit up - so we're all ears. :)
     
  4. badders

    badders Neuken in de Keuken

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    Sounds like you've got it all covered really - I'm not sure what specifically I'd like to read, just that it's in-depth, technical, and takes a re-read to fully understand it all. :D
     
  5. Horizon

    Horizon Dremel Worthy

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    you guys don't know much about cars. ati/nvidiaapple = oranges, only thing they have in common that they are both fruit

    it's like a carbed engine vs. efi = they both do the same thing and that's about it.

    a closer analogy

    one vehicle with a large wide band* hp motor vs. one with a main(master) engine and engines housed housed in each wheel

    the latter vehicle capable of producing more usable torque but if the wheels aren't always getting proper traction.
     
  6. play_boy_2000

    play_boy_2000 ^It was funny when I was 12

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    Off topic slightly:

    Could a stream processor be used in (IP) routing?

    Both technologies seem to be a massively parralell computing device situated siturated on a high speed bus, so from my uneducated perspective, it looks like a pretty simple possiblity, although I sure Cisco would have bought ATI or Nvidia years ago if it were really that simple.

    Perhaps those opensauce folks over at quagga and xorp are dreaming of much the same thing.
     
  7. Ending Credits

    Ending Credits Bunned

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    I know a lot about cars compared to my mother so I suppose it's all relative :p.
     
  8. spike9012

    spike9012 What's a Dremel?

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    This does shed some light on how they work but at the end of the day, how is nVidia so faster much than ATI with so few SPs?
     
  9. Tim S

    Tim S OG

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    That's a good question.

    First of all, Nvidia runs its shader core at a much higher clock speed (GTX 280 runs at 1,296MHz, while some of the older G92-based products run at up to 1,900MHz) and that means Nvidia can hit the same performance level with less ALUs. Secondly, I don't think every game makes full use of the ATI shader core all of the time - there are times when it's significantly faster, and times when it can be significantly slower. Basically, because Nvidia uses a scalar architecture, each stream processor has the same capabilities and you can throw code at the stream processors - there's no need for that code to be organised. AMD's unified architecture, on the other hand, is classed as superscalar (or sometimes vec4+scalar - four vectors and one scalar), which means that code has to be organised enough, or complex enough, to go wide across the superscalar shader processor (five stream processors).
     
  10. wyx087

    wyx087 Homeworld 3 is happening!!

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    if optimisation is what AMD/ATI needs, then when are they going to do the "best played on AMD" thing?

    almost every game i see is now nVidia sponsored. surely if ATI get a few more AAA titles "plays best" on their superscalar, they'd score more benchmarks and thus get more sales
     
  11. Tim S

    Tim S OG

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    Well, I'm hopefully going to be speaking with AMD about devrel soon. :)
     
  12. wolfticket

    wolfticket Downwind from the bloodhounds

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    I have a bad habit of choosing the most elegant solution over the most effective one.
    This thread has cemented my preference for red cards, in spite of it not actually saying they are better per se :sigh:
     

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