New Article: Predicting GPU Performance for AMD and Nvidia

As many of you may have noticed, we've had a profusion of new articles at RWT in the last few months. I have been writing one short article per week, for the last 5 weeks, while still working on several longer pieces (Poulson, z196, cough cough).

I'd like to take this opportunity to remind everyone that we have a front page (yes it's true!), and that we will be updating it regularly.

I hope everyone that enjoys my articles will make it a practice to check the front page regularly (I aim for M/Tu releases, sometime Wednesday), or at least subscribe to our RSS feed : )

Without further ado, here's the deal on this weeks article:

Modern graphics processors are incredibly complex, but understanding their performance is essential, as they become an increasingly important component of computer systems. In this report, we use a set of benchmark results to build accurate performance models for AMD and Nvidia GPUs. We verify that our model can predict performance within roughly 6-8% for many desktop graphics cards and show how Nvidia’s microarchitecture and drivers achieve roughly 2X higher utilization than AMD’s VLIW5 design.

http://www.realworldtech.com/page.cfm?ArticleID=RWT041111203710

As always, enjoy and we welcome and encourage comments and discussion.

David