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AMD Ups The Workstation Ante With A New FirePro Driver (Linux )
Phoronix ^ | July 28, 2010 | Michael Larabel

Posted on 07/28/2010 7:24:36 PM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach

Whether you are an owner of an ATI FirePro V3800 that retails for just over $100 USD, the proud owner of an ATI FirePro V8800 that goes for over $1,300 USD, or any of the FirePro products in-between, you will want to update your graphics driver when AMD puts out their next stable software update. Back in March AMD put out an amazing FirePro Linux driver that increased the performance of their workstation graphics cards already on the market (and the other Evergreen-based workstation cards that entered the market soon after) by an astonishing amount. Our independent tests of this proprietary Linux driver update found that the performance in some workstation applications had increased by up to 59% by simply installing this updated driver while other OpenGL tests had just improved rather modestly with 20%+ gains. AMD though is preparing to release another driver update for Microsoft Windows and Linux that ups their workstation graphics performance even more! We have run some tests of this new beta driver against their older driver with both their low-end and ultra-high-end FirePro products and have found the improvements again to be astonishing.

On Monday there was a new beta driver from Advanced Micro Devices that they released for Windows and it was tagged the 8.76.2 beta. While on the Windows consumer side they were focusing on OpenGL ES 2.0 support, on the workstation side they have been further optimizing their OpenGL stack. AMD's press department had told us that this updated driver provided a "More than 50% increase in performance for ATI FirePro V8800 on the 3ds Max subset of the SPECviewperf 10 benchmark, as well as a 40% gain on the Catia subset, a 20% gain on the Pro E subset and more than 20% gain on the overall composite." AMD also advertised a 62% performance gain for the V3800 and an 81% performance gain for the V8800 in other benchmarks when comparing the fglrx 8.76.2 beta to their previous driver.

AMD's announcement on Monday was targeting their Windows workstation customers and had only made available publicly a Windows 8.76.2 beta driver, but we decided to test these claims on the Linux side.

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TOPICS: Business/Economy; Computers/Internet; Music/Entertainment
KEYWORDS: graphics; hitech; linux
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To: Ernest_at_the_Beach

Neither. I’m working on doing some scientific computations related to optical stuff. Basically doing a lot of FFTs.


21 posted on 08/03/2010 7:50:23 PM PDT by krb (Obama is a miserable failure.)
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To: krb

Fortran usage in some way?


22 posted on 08/03/2010 8:05:42 PM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach ( Support Geert Wilders)
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To: Ernest_at_the_Beach

Nope, OpenCL :-)

OpenCL is a new language specification that is a lot like C, but has extra type information to accommodate the fact that the graphics card runs lots of “kernels” and has processor features that can schedule 4 or 5 instructions in one cycle.


23 posted on 08/03/2010 8:13:31 PM PDT by krb (Obama is a miserable failure.)
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To: krb
Well...that is very interesting....

Got any suggestions on where to learn a little on the language?

24 posted on 08/03/2010 8:20:31 PM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach ( Support Geert Wilders)
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To: Ernest_at_the_Beach

Here’s the main page for OpenCL:

http://www.khronos.org/opencl/

If you have time, these videos are an excellent introduction:
http://www.macresearch.org/opencl_episode1
http://www.macresearch.org/opencl_episode2
http://www.macresearch.org/opencl_episode3
http://www.macresearch.org/opencl_episode4
http://www.macresearch.org/opencl_episode5
http://www.macresearch.org/opencl_episode6


25 posted on 08/03/2010 8:27:10 PM PDT by krb (Obama is a miserable failure.)
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To: krb

Thank you very much....


26 posted on 08/03/2010 8:40:47 PM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach ( Support Geert Wilders)
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