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OpenCL: Rendering Performance

AMD FirePro W8100 Review: The Professional Radeon R9 290
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LuxMark vs. RatGPU

Meet two different rendering engines that take different approaches. First, there's the popular LuxRender, on which LuxMark is based. This one finally attracted Nvidia's attention after showing up time and again as a weak spot for the company's GeForce and Quadro cards. RatGPU, on the other hand, didn't need that special attention; Nvidia's offerings did well in it right out of the gate.

LuxRender demonstrates that Nvidia's cards do support OpenCL fairly well, if there's no CUDA option. AMD once enjoyed a significant performance advantage in this test, though the magnitude of its wins is shrinking. The following charts represent LuxMark at three difficulty settings:

The FirePro cards land in order of their shader performance for simple single-precision tasks. This changes as the workloads get more complex, allowing the FirePro W8100 to draw even with Nvidia’s Quadro K6000.

Conversely, AMD’s graphics cards don’t do as well in ratGPU. This benchmark isn’t one that gets much attention. Consequently, the two large graphics card vendors don't appear to optimize for it.

Regardless, the rendering approach seems to favor Nvidia’s cards. We once again choose three different difficulty levels.

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  • 0 Hide
    Nuckles_56 , 30 July 2014 08:33
    "It almost catches up to the GeForce GTX 780 Ti 3 GB as well, cutting the consumer card’s 14-percent lead down to only two percent. "

    This should be the GTX 780 instead
  • 0 Hide
    mi1ez , 30 July 2014 22:45
    Quote:
    Even the reference cooler appears to remain the same, which is somewhat disappointing next to Nvidia's redesigned Quadro cards.


    1: it's a workstation card.
    2: I quite like it.