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Your Graphics Card: How Old/New Is It?


jakj

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To extend jakj's statement: Be careful with any sort of performance metric: There are so many measuring sticks out there, and not all of them measure equally on the same systems. For example, next-generation supercomputers using heterogeneous platforms (GPU/CPU pairs) can tout all the peta and zeta FLOPS they want. But that's an old metric back in the day when cpu floating point operations per unit time was the limiting factor. The current limiting factor for them is busing data between nodes and duplicating unnecessarily data in software (for 3-D problems, up to an order of magnitude worth more data and calculations). So I can have a faster FLOPS supercomputer that is actually slower because of the busing issue.

Of course, if you have a computer like Watson, then FLOPS are the limiting factor. Right?

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To extend jakj's statement: Be careful with any sort of performance metric: There are so many measuring sticks out there, and not all of them measure equally on the same systems. For example, next-generation supercomputers using heterogeneous platforms (GPU/CPU pairs) can tout all the peta and zeta FLOPS they want. But that's an old metric back in the day when cpu floating point operations per unit time was the limiting factor. The current limiting factor for them is busing data between nodes and duplicating unnecessarily data in software (for 3-D problems, up to an order of magnitude worth more data and calculations). So I can have a faster FLOPS supercomputer that is actually slower because of the busing issue.

do you mean like the communication with system memory and communication across the PCIe bus? or do you mean the communication backbone for independent computing node in computer clusters? or both for that matter i suppose.

And hte idea of measuring minecraft i think i left out is to apply pressure to the system in an unusual manner.

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do you mean like the communication with system memory and communication across the PCIe bus? or do you mean the communication backbone for independent computing node in computer clusters? or both for that matter i suppose.

It doesn't have to be clusters (though it certainly applies between nodes there), even the bus between my RAM and my video card was the bottleneck for some research calculations I was doing with CUDA, depending on the application. You'd probably know more about motherboards than I do, but I'm pretty sure the buses between RAM and CPU are designed a bit differently than the small buses between the graphic card's onboard RAM and one of its processors.

All in all, it's like having a woodchipper that has enough power to grind a fully-grown redwood tree at a time, but you can only feed it sticks no bigger than your wrist.

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It doesn't have to be clusters (though it certainly applies between nodes there), even the bus between my RAM and my video card was the bottleneck for some research calculations I was doing with CUDA, depending on the application. You'd probably know more about motherboards than I do, but I'm pretty sure the buses between RAM and CPU are designed a bit differently than the small buses between the graphic card's onboard RAM and one of its processors.

All in all, it's like having a woodchipper that has enough power to grind a fully-grown redwood tree at a time, but you can only feed it sticks no bigger than your wrist.

This has more to do with Latency in modern systems than with the data width and transmission speed. PCIe is a fairly high latency connection, that's why SLI and CrossFire cards connect to each other through a specially designed interface.

I just helped my friend assemble his new computer replacing the Pentium 4 HT 3.4GHz with DDR2 667 Ram computer with a Core i3 550 3.5GHz dual core and 8GB DDR3 1333 ram and the minecraft performance is just absolutely night and day even tho hes still using a GeForce 9600GSO (128bit) graphics card.

I have another computer with a Pentium E2220 2.4GHz dual core cpu and Dual Channel DDR2 800 ram that i can benchmark minecraft on using a number of different cards to see just what kind of impact the graphics card has (Avalible for testing include a Geforce 8400 GS 512mb, 7600 GS 512mb, 9600 GSO either 512mb of 768mb cant remember, 6200 Turbocache 32mb might not still work, Radeon HD 3450 256mb, Quadro FX 3700 512mb and possibly a a Radeon x300 128mb if i can find it.)

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