GPGPU: ATI vs nVidia

A

alg7_munif

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
Oct 9, 2006
Messages
5,862
It seems that nVidia is pushing the boundaries of what a GPU can do with their CUDA implementation. With CUDA, their GPU can have the ability of doing a physic calculation, folding and even accelerating the multimedia processing. On the other side, ATI seems very quiet about what their GPU can do and sometimes it looks like ATI has nothing to compete with CUDA. The truth is ATI has discovered other functions of their GPU long before nVidia came out with their CUDA but they never pushed the ideas like nVidia did with CUDA. Let's see what ATI has already done in the GPGPU direction:

Folding:
A folding client for ATI cards was out since Catalyst 6.5:
http://www.stanford.edu/group/pandegroup/folding/FAQ-ATI.html

Now there is a new GPU 2 client which also supports nVidia cards is out but still in beta phase so the performance and and stability is not final yet.
​

Multimedia processing:
Additional to the UVD which is supported since the HD2600 series, their X1000 series has already supported a neat video converting feature in the catalyst control centre. According to the tech spec, their new HD4800 series also support a new feature called AVT for accelerated video transcoding & encoding for H.264 and MPEG-2 formats.​

Developement tool:
Like CUDA, ATI also have their CAL and their SDK. They also sell some of their GPUs as stream processor :
http://ati.amd.com/technology/streamcomputing/sdkdwnld.html​

Physic support:
Not long ago ATI was working with Havok to bring the physics calculation to the GPU but I guess that that won't happen anymore since Havok is not under Intel so I think that Intel won't let physics calculation to leave their CPU.
http://ati.amd.com/technology/crossfire/physics/index.html​

I think that the only advantage nVidia have with CUDA right now is PhysX support but Ageia failed because not many games support it. Unless more games will support PhysX in the future, I doubt that PhysX would be a deal breaker.

I guess that the reason AMD doesn't push their GPGPU ability as much as nVidia did with their CUDA is because AMD already has their own CPU for the general purpose computing. I think that having both CPU and GPU technology will give AMD an advantage in the fututre to combine the general purpose computing with specific task computing. I think that Fusion would be their first product in this direction.
 
I guess that the reason AMD doesn't push their GPGPU ability as much as nVidia did with their CUDA is because AMD already has their own CPU for the general purpose computing. I think that having both CPU and GPU technology will give AMD an advantage in the fututre to combine the general purpose computing with specific task computing. I think that Fusion would be their first product in this direction.
Click to expand...

There's no doubt but I would still put my money on Nvidia given there cash flow in comparison to AMD/ATI. The only real nuckle at this point is the rivalry between Intel and Nvidia. AMD purchasing ATI has placed a long time corporate supporter of Nvidia in termoil and the latest product release is testimant to this. Nvidia should really consider working with Intel on some sort of collaboration and bury the hatchet. I don't think working with VIA would be a very good idea.
 
From here:
Accelerated Video Transcoding (AVT) - AVT allows you to convert videos to H.264 and MPEG-2 formats up to 19x faster than when using a just CPU. Full 1080p files can be converted to H.264 and MPEG-2 up to 1.8x faster than real-time.
Click to expand...
 
pxc said:
Vapor.
Click to expand...

They wrote this in the fine print:
3. This may vary depending on your system configuration and video formats. Using an Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 3.16 GHz based PC, AMD was able to achieve GPU accelerated transcoding speeds up to 19x faster using Cyberlink PowerDirector than when using the same CPU alone with MainConcept encoder in Adobe Premiere CS3. Using the same system, full 1080p files were converted 1.8x faster than real-time.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top