I am going to do a new PC build in a couple of months, and I may be able to upgrade the GPU on one other machine. Currently, I run nVidia GPUs, however, I note that some AMD GPUs far exceed the processing speed of my 1GB GTX 460 on MW@H (some by a factor of 10 in terms of total compute time).

If I do upgrade the GPU in the other machine, what I would be looking to do is buy an inexpensive AMD GPU (maybe 77X0 or 78X0) and then dedicate that to MW@H.

To that end, I am wondering whether anyone has compiled a list of GPUs vs their performance on MW@H. I would prefer to get an AMD GPU that has at least 3x the performance of my GTX 460, and having such a list would be helpful.

Thanks.

PS - I searched for GPU performance, but I did not find anything. My apologies if this is duplicates another thread.

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You can start by taking a look here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_AMD_graphics_processing_units
Make certain to get a card capable of double precision processing. Take a look at the top credit crunchers in the stats and you can see what they are running.

I don't have a good list at hand, but performance at MW is directly proportional to the theoretical maximum double precision performance. Which is 1/16th the single precisions performance (usually only this number is quoted in reviews) for HD77x0 and HD78x0, so these are actually rather bad at MW. For your GTX460 it's 1/12th - better, but still inefficient. GTX680 even goes as far 1/24 *ouch*

For HD79x0 and HD69x0 it's 1/4th, that's where their strength at MW comes from. Any AMD capable of double precision older than these has a ration of 1/5, which is still very good.

In essence: you can calculate the performance of pretty much any AMD by the following:
clock speed * number of shaders * double precision fraction

There's a slight exception to this rule: currently the HD7xx0 have to run less efficient code, so there's still some untapped potential left in them.

MrS

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Scanning for our furry friends since Jan 2002

Thanks for the replies. They are a good starting point.

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