Posted on Wednesday, October 12 2005 @ 1:51 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
The Tech Report reports about one of the aspects of ATI's Radeon X1K which hasn't been mentioned a lot: use capability to use ATI's GPUs for non-graphics applications like running physics.
ATI practically kicked off its press event for the Radeon X1000 series with a physics demo running on a Radeon graphics card. Rich Heye, VP and GM of ATI's Desktop Business Unit, showed off a simulation of rolling ocean waves comparing physics performance on a CPU versus a GPU. The CPU-based version of the demo was slow and choppy, while the Radeon churned through the simulation well enough to make the waves flow, er, fluidly. The GPU, he proclaimed, is very good for physics work, and he threw out some impressive FLOPS numbers to accentuate the point. A Pentium 4 at 3GHz, he said, peaks out at 12 GFLOPS and has 5.96GB/s of memory bandwidth. By contrast, a Radeon X1800 XT can reach 83 GFLOPS and has 42GB/s of memory bandwidth.
Looks like AGEIA will need to worry about some fierce competition.
Read on over
here.
