[mythtv-users] OT: VDPAU and VP3 or VP2?

Raymond Wagner raymond at wagnerrp.com
Thu Jul 30 19:40:53 UTC 2009


R. G. Newbury wrote:
> 8600 for AMD chipsets, 9500 for Intel
What are you talking about?  Discrete cards don't matter what processor 
brand you use.  The only reason people use 8200 chips on AMD systems and 
9300 chips on Intel systems is because that is what is available 
integrated onto the motherboard.

> The recommended cards have more shaders, than the lower level cards. 
> The clock speeds are not that different.
It's the same thing as a multicore processor.  More shaders means more 
parallelism, while higher clock speed means higher serial throughput.  
However most things graphical are embarrassingly parallel, and the 
architectural decisions of GPUs makes it difficult to continually ramp 
up the clock speed.

> The latest/greatest ATI Firepro for gamers has 800 shader processors 
> (and costs $1,500)!!  The hottest (in more ways than one) Nvidia 
> Quadro FX3800 has 192. IIRC the 8600 and 9500 have 16 or 32!
The FireGL and Quadro cards are NOT the 'latest/greatest' cards.  The 
top end V8700 has the same shader count as the HD4870, but has a lesser 
clock rate.  The FX5800 (the 3800 is an old card) is identical to the 
240 shader GTX285, but the dual chip GTX295 is more powerful.  
Furthermore, you can't just say 'ATI is moar betters' because it has 
more shaders.  Its a wholly different architecture.  You can't compare 
them on those basic specs.

The reason people buy Quadro/FireGL cards is not the raw performance.  
You get far better support than comes with the standard consumer cards.  
You get some custom optimizations for various CAD and other professional 
programs in both hardware and drivers.  You get more memory, and 
quad-buffering so you can properly run stereo displays.  You can get 
other options like SDI outputs, or genlock/framelock (external timing 
signal) support.


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