JeGX's Infamous Lab

Archive for the ‘Graphics Cards’ Category

A graphics card with a very nice looking GPU cooler. Unfortunately, this card will available in Korea only…

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I found this thread on [H]ard|Forum where we can read this:

“That fur demo is known to get cards the hottest, it is also known for smoking cards as well (it was the last thing run for a number of people on the extremesystems forums).”

I knew FurMark was good for heating the graphics cards up but I didn’t know it’s also good to really kill them. I feel the summer will be hot for some graphics cards…

Here is a sum-up of the next GPGPU: far more important than you think. Think 10x a CPU’s performance.

This article discusses about the use of GPU for non-graphical purposes or GPGPU (General Purpose (computation) on Graphics Processing Units). The author talks essentially about ATI 3870 X2 and the FireStream 9170 Stream Processor but don’t forget that NVIDIA has also the same kind of products with the Geforce 8 or Tesla. ATI’s Radeon HD 3870 X2 can hit around 1TFLOPS (one trillion floating-point operations per second), in contrast, a high-end quad-core CPU can push out around 60GFLOPS, or one-sixteenth the amount of floating-point power.

To program the GPU for non graphical rendering, you can use the The FireStream SDK (Software Development Kit) for ATI cards that gives the developer low-level access to the workings of the GPU. With NVIDIA boards, you can use CUDA to perform equivalent tasks.

And the final sentence:

”So the next time you look at the Radeon HD 3870 or NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT in your machine, remember that it’s more than just a graphics card; it’s a floating-point monster that will increasingly be used for non-graphical tasks.”

Related Links:

Sapphire’s 3870 X2 ATOMIC version will hit US and Europe market next month. This card will have 1Gb of GDDR3 memory, Dual DVI / TVO with Water Cooler. Nice product.

You can see two kind of power connectors: 2×3 and 2×4. The first one (2×3) is the regular PCI-Express power connector and the second one (2×4) is the new PCI-Express 2.0 connector.

More pitures on the Radeon 3870X2 ATOMIC: Sapphire_Prepares_ATOMIC_3870-X2.

Voilà histoire de bosser notre anglais, la Radeon HD 3870 X2 en video…

In the version 1.4.0 of GPU Caps Viewer, I added a validation functionality:

A similar facility can be found in CPU-Z or GPU-Z:

The validation allows you to submit online the graphics card data (renderer name, drivers version, gpu codename, texture units, opengl version, and so on.). Just click on the [Submit] button of the Validation group. This operation sends video card data to oZone3D.Net server. You can see all recent submissions here. If you have filled the email field (email and name fields are optional), you will receive the url of the validation webpage. Here is an exemple with my graphics card: GeForce 8800 GTX

The validation is useful to display your graphics system in a neat manner: a sîmple URL you can add everywhere (in email/forum signature for example). You can use the validation url to bring additional information for graphics benchmarking or to help graphics applications developers to find a problem / fix a bug.

Alessandro, the next time try to play the Jingle Bells song with a SLI…

Le site www.hardware.info propose une compétition d’overclocking de GPU et utilise le Fur Rendering Benchmark comme utilitaire principal (bon c’est ma version des faits vu que tout est écrit en néerlandais mais je ne dois pas me tromper de beaucoup – si quelqu’un comprend cette langue, merci d’avance pour un petit feedback de ce qui s’y raconte). Décidément, le fur benchmark fait parler de lui ces derniers temps. Mais le truc marrant c’est que tout le monde s’obstine à utiliser la version 1.0.0 alors que la version 1.1.0 existe…

Petit test sympathique des dernieres Radeon. Pourquoi sympathique? Tout simplement parcequ’il utilise le fur benchmark en plus des éternels 3dmark ou jeux vidéos (genre crysis, quake wars). C’est le second test que je trouve qui utilise le fur benchmark et ils ont raison. Les gros benchmarks comme 3DMark/Crysis font travailler le GPU mais aussi le CPU et îl n’est parfois pas très évident de voir l’influence d’une carte graphique avec ce genre de test. En fait ces tests doivent être réservés pour bencher une configuration complète (CPU/RAM/GPU) pour gamers. Mais si l’on veut se concentrer uniquement sur la carte graphique, il faut que la charge CPU soit le plus faible possible (pas de trop quand même sinon le GPU va commencer à attendre les données). En ce sens, le fur benchmark convient très bien car sa charge CPU est relativement faible et la charge GPU très élevée. Du coup, pratiquement n’importe quel système CPU/RAM (bon peut être pas un PIII mais sait-on jamais) est bon pour bencher une carte 3d avec le fur benchmark.

Le test complet se trouve ici: www.virtualegion.com/index.php?topic=1637.0