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Number crunching :
Which GPU?
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Send message Joined: 5 Jul 11 Posts: 990 Credit: 376,143,149 RAC: 3 |
I prefer AMD GPUs for price/performance ratio. But I can't find any information on which models are best for double precision. All the benchmarks just quote certain games, or single precision. And AFAIK Milkyway uses double precision. What do other projects use? Does anyone know where I can look at a list of currently available AMD GPUs to compare double precision? All I have at the moment is an old R9 290, and a brand new RX 560. The 560 should be half the speed of the 290 (going by the single FP speed on reviews), but it's running at about 1/4 of the speed for Milkyway, so I assume they scrimped on the double precision. Anyone running an RX 580 (which I plan to get for gaming)? |
Send message Joined: 9 Jul 17 Posts: 100 Credit: 16,967,906 RAC: 0 |
These give the performance figures: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_graphics_processing_units https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nvidia_graphics_processing_units I don't see any particularly good buys though. |
Send message Joined: 5 Jul 11 Posts: 990 Credit: 376,143,149 RAC: 3 |
Nothing seems to have much double precision anymore. Is this because games don't use it? What about bitcoin mining? Cards seem to be getting made for that nowadays. My 5 year old R9 290 outperforms everything at double! And do you know if other BOINC projects use single or double? I think SETI is single, as it's working on my very old Nvidea card that will only run that and Prime. |
Send message Joined: 9 Jul 17 Posts: 100 Credit: 16,967,906 RAC: 0 |
The R9 290 was one of the better ones. Insofar as I know, nothing else uses it. I am not a gamer, but if they needed it, cards would be great at it; same for bitcoin. Only the professionals use it, so they pay for it. |
Send message Joined: 5 Jul 11 Posts: 990 Credit: 376,143,149 RAC: 3 |
I got the 290 as a gamer recommended it to me years ago, and I build gaming PCs as a small business. I then used it and several other 290s back when altcoin mining was vaguely profitable. So most games only use single precision? Also Einstein and SETI etc? Compared with CPUs, graphics cards don't seem to be improving so well over the last few years. |
Send message Joined: 10 Dec 17 Posts: 47 Credit: 695,662,962 RAC: 0 |
Hi, I have an entire spreadsheet with info. I can't link it at work, google docs is blocked :( I'll reply tonight from home. It depends on how hands-on you like to be, if you have no problem rigging up your own cooling solution, the FirePro (S91xx) server cards are fantastic for FP64 and a *very* good value for cost/performance ratio. The server cards are passive, heat-sink only, you need to figure out a way to actively cool them. I use 40mm fans, but these are VERY LOUD. There are Workstation versions (W9100 etc) of the card that have built in fans like a normal GPU, but they tend to be more expensive. Still offer the best raw performance however. Just as a point of reference, depending on the exact model, the S9100 and S9150 offer somewhere in the neighborhood of ~2500 GFLOPS of FP64 performance. Stepping down to the consumer Radeon cards, you're best bet is still the 280X. Depending on the exact model, clockspeeds etc, they offer, roughly, around 1000 GFLOPS. Similar cards, (AMD does a lot of re-branding, with the same/slightly tweaked hardware) such as the preceding 7970 offer roughly the same performance. 7950 slightly below that etc. Keep in mind the xx90 (6690, 7790) cards are dual-GPU on single card, and offer slightly better performance-per-watts than running two separate cards. I can't recall the exact GFLOPS for these off the top of my head (though easy enough to look up on wiki). I personally run a 6990 and am pretty happy with the performance, but that was before I discovered the S9150. The 290 is 'ok' but not great with FP64, less performance than 280x. All the newer 3xx/4xx/5xx series simply do not offer strong FP64. Better single precision yes (that's all games need) but even Vega is not particularly strong in double precision. By far the best bang for the buck is the FirePro server cards if you can deal with the cooling and resulting noise. or the regular 280X for an easy drop-in solution. Have fun! :D |
Send message Joined: 5 Jul 11 Posts: 990 Credit: 376,143,149 RAC: 3 |
I had a 7990 (I think) - a dual AMD card for altcoin mining. The only way to get it to run at full speed was to actually replace the 12 inch side fan on the computer case with a car radiator fan (an 80 watt fan that made a racket). It's simply impossible to cool two GPUs on one card sensibly! Firepro 9000 series are a few grand aren't they? (in GBP £) - I think I'd rather get three of 2nd hand 290. |
Send message Joined: 10 Dec 17 Posts: 47 Credit: 695,662,962 RAC: 0 |
Rough numbers, FP64 performance. will vary with clockspeeds etc 290: 606 gflops 560: 163 gflops 580: 385 gflops 280x: 1024 gflops 6990: 1276 gflops 7990: 1894 gflops S9150: 2530 gflops Keep in mind this is only half the story. Other important question is the energy (watts) required for this performance. My spreadsheet goes into all of this and makes calculations based on TDP of gflops-per-watt and other considerations (including purchase price, for $cost-per-gflops) |
Send message Joined: 10 Dec 17 Posts: 47 Credit: 695,662,962 RAC: 0 |
I bought my S9150 for $340 USD on ebay. Currently see other S9100 cards for $300-400 USD. W9100 card (basically the same card, with built-in cooling fan) is $800-1000 or more. Crazy. lol. So if you can rig up the cooling, the price/performance just blows everything else out of the water. Otherwise, 280X all the way. |
Send message Joined: 5 Jul 11 Posts: 990 Credit: 376,143,149 RAC: 3 |
If I was only doing double precision I might consider it, but AFAIK most projects use single. I also use the cards for playing games. Oh and I hate noise! |
Send message Joined: 10 Dec 17 Posts: 47 Credit: 695,662,962 RAC: 0 |
Ahh, well Milkyway is the only project I crunch so I bought the cards specifically for it. 580 should be good for games then. :) |
Send message Joined: 8 May 09 Posts: 3321 Credit: 520,604,159 RAC: 30,704 |
I prefer AMD GPUs for price/performance ratio. But I can't find any information on which models are best for double precision. All the benchmarks just quote certain games, or single precision. And AFAIK Milkyway uses double precision. What do other projects use? Does anyone know where I can look at a list of currently available AMD GPUs to compare double precision? Try here too: http://www.geeks3d.com/20140305/amd-radeon-and-nvidia-geforce-fp32-fp64-gflops-table-computing/ GeForce GTX 580 1581 197 FP64 = 1/8 FP32 |
Send message Joined: 10 Dec 17 Posts: 47 Credit: 695,662,962 RAC: 0 |
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ImSDoLeuZFvmO6xoMpy2VMs9Du_6sHT5GqcORMtx2tQ That link should work for my Spreadsheet. Still a work in progress and there's some missing data and some extra fluff like the "fake rank" column where I decided to try and assign a very-rough estimate of overall general performance based on Cores*Clockspeed. The main focus is showing 3 main variables (GFLOPS, Price, Watts) and how they interact. Unfortunately due to locking/merging certain cells I cannot dynamically sort the columns how I would like. Still determining if there is a way I can do that. |
Send message Joined: 18 Nov 08 Posts: 291 Credit: 2,461,693,501 RAC: 0 |
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ImSDoLeuZFvmO6xoMpy2VMs9Du_6sHT5GqcORMtx2tQ Nice spreadsheet, thanks! Want to mention that the S9000 is listed at "<225" at WiKi, and I suspect it is no more than 200 and may be closer to 150 than 225. It has a single 8 pin PCIe which has 3 12v power leads unlike the "200w" 7950 which has 4 (two 6pin ) or 5 (6pin+8pin). I lost a pair of 7950 due to overheat and the remaining I converted to liquid cooling. When I got my first S9000 (new, unused for $150 but passive cooling), I discovered the left over HD7950 fan cooling fit perfectly on the S9000. Depending on the OEM, the cooling assembly also cooled the memory chips on the GPU side of the board. MSI and PowerColor heat sinks serviced only the GPU chip. I now have 3 of the S9000 and they all run cool. I had to use a dremmel to cut a small amount of plastic from the shroud exhaust end on a gigabyte cooling assembly so one of the S9000 would fit in case. Anyone with a dead HD7950 but working cooling assembly can essentially get a brand new, unused replacement for under $160. Crossfire is not supported and a 3pin molex must be forced into the 4 pin cooling cable to make the fans run. Since I run 24/7 this as fine for me. |
Send message Joined: 5 Jul 11 Posts: 990 Credit: 376,143,149 RAC: 3 |
Don't GPUs have thermal protection like CPUs? Even if a CPU fan fails completely, the CPU just slows down. I actually had a guy bring me a computer he said "quickly slowed down once I started using it", I discovered the heatsink had actually come away from the CPU! But no damage done, it just got slower to maintain a sensible die temperature. |
Send message Joined: 5 Jul 11 Posts: 990 Credit: 376,143,149 RAC: 3 |
Can't Milkyway use Single Precision instead? From what I've read, a double precision calculation can be emulated using two single precision calculations. This would speed things up on almost every GPU out there. |
Send message Joined: 18 Nov 08 Posts: 291 Credit: 2,461,693,501 RAC: 0 |
Can't Milkyway use Single Precision instead? From what I've read, a double precision calculation can be emulated using two single precision calculations. This would speed things up on almost every GPU out there. Single precision is accurate to 7 digits and double to 15 as illustrated here If your accuracy requires more than 7 digits of precison you use double precision: either in hardware or using a library that emulates double precision. Possibly, some optimization could be done to speed things up as SETI lunatics did for setiathome. I had to program in CMS-2M on navy systems that did not support floating point hardware. It was all done using scaled arithmetic, binary angles, and trig lookup tables. Floating point hardware would have made a huge difference in cost, especially labor. |
Send message Joined: 5 Jul 11 Posts: 990 Credit: 376,143,149 RAC: 3 |
It's the emulation I was considering. I read somewhere something like "for some reason Milkyway doesn't use well known algorithms to run on single precision hardware, but Einstein and SETI do". As far as I know the emulator would use two single precision calculations to get a double precision one done, but single precision on most graphics cards is well more than twice as fast. |
Send message Joined: 10 Dec 17 Posts: 47 Credit: 695,662,962 RAC: 0 |
Want to mention that the S9000 is listed at "<225" at WiKi, and I suspect it is no more than 200 and may be closer to 150 than 225. I suspect that could very well be. Wiki isn't necessarily 100% accurate itself anyhow. Really just a rough estimate at best. |
Send message Joined: 5 Jul 11 Posts: 990 Credit: 376,143,149 RAC: 3 |
I notice graphics card manufactures are designing cards to work well with coin mining, so why don't they design them to work well with boinc? We want double precision! And we want it now! |
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