| jmke | 11th October 2005 18:25 |
ATI stakes claims on physics, GPGPU ground
One of the more surprising aspects of ATI's Radeon X1000 series launch is something we didn't get a chance to talk about in our initial review of the graphics cards: ATI's eagerness to talk about using its GPUs for non-graphics applications.
ATI practically kicked off its press event for the Radeon X1000 series with a physics demo running on a Radeon graphics card. Rich Heye, VP and GM of ATI's Desktop Business Unit, showed off a simulation of rolling ocean waves comparing physics performance on a CPU versus a GPU. The CPU-based version of the demo was slow and choppy, while the Radeon churned through the simulation well enough to make the waves flow, er, fluidly. The GPU, he proclaimed, is very good for physics work, and he threw out some impressive FLOPS numbers to accentuate the point. A Pentium 4 at 3GHz, he said, peaks out at 12 GFLOPS and has 5.96GB/s of memory bandwidth. By contrast, a Radeon X1800 XT can reach 83 GFLOPS and has 42GB/s of memory bandwidth. http://techreport.com/onearticle.x/8887 | 