Three Terafloops

I may have jumped in too early on my new video card.

I got a Radeon 7950 for Shana, my new Windows box.  That's a huge upgrade from the 4850 in Nagi, but it looks as though a better idea would have been to wait for the 7870.

While the 7950 has 40% more shaders (1792 vs. 1280), it runs at a 20% slower clock speed (800MHz vs. 1GHz), leaving it only slightly faster in shader performance.  Both chips have 32 rendering units, but the clock speed on the 7870 gives it the advantage, so the cheaper card has a higher pixel fill rate despite the 7950's greater bandwidth.

My 7950 is factory overclocked to 900MHz, closing half the gap, but there's still probably little advantage to the more expensive card for most games.

Using the 7950 as a double-precision compute engine is a different story; the 7900 cards have full double-precision units giving them about four times the performance of the 7800 models.  But I don't spend that much time on computational fluid dynamics these days.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:00 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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