HD7970 vs FirePro V8800
Is there any reason why I should not go with the AMD Radeon™ HD7970 Graphics? I mean it’s a popping 970GFlops DP, which I think satisfies my needs and then some.
I will be working with OpenFOAM or OpenCL, and my own variant of CFD/CE with my own pre and post processing meshing suite. I don’t know much about the drivers, because it isn’t something I’m all that interested in, and so I’m not clear on what changes are made between the professional and the desktop drivers that affect performance. I assume much of this has to do with vector/scalar manipulation and optimizing the usage of the accumulators/registers.
I want to do a lot of this sort of thing!
I guess what I’m saying is, are the drivers tailored to the application, or the specific softwares themselves? Is it that the driver is tailored to CFE/CAD/CAE, or is it that the driver is tailored to Solid Works, AutoCAD, CATIA and so on . . . .
I think HD7970 would be a good choice. Merely because it is from the southern islands family which went a complete architectural change since V8800 (which comes from the Evergreen family). 7970 is the Tahiti XT which I know to be really good. Generally drivers have application profiles which identify bottlenecks in applications and try to optimize those paths. Generally, these are big brand name apps and for the workstation ones you will find application profiles for AutoCAD, SolidWorks etc. I am not sure if the OpenCL drivers have such application profiles or not but the DirectX ones definitely do. So if you are using OpenCL, you might want to dig in a little bit to see if application profiles are indeed released. Apart from that, considering your application, I think you can write decent optimized code and to clearly answer your question – drivers are optimized to give good performance (based on the specs) – so they are not tailored to CFE/CAD/CAE etc. However, as I mentioned before, sometimes they do have app profiles to improve performance in specific apps.