GTX5xx vs GTX6xx vs ATI 7970?

[Morne]

Hi all

So the 580 use to be king, but what now about the 680? I read somewhere that all the 6xx are throttled or capped at performance so that people rather get Quadros.
Is this the case?

Both for viewport and for RT which GTX would you currently recommend?

How far is the OpenCL issues with the ATI from being resolved? Is the 7970 a viable option over a GTX?

[vlado]

So the 580 use to be king, but what now about the 680?

The 580 is still king of the hill.

I read somewhere that all the 6xx are throttled or capped at performance so that people rather get Quadros.

Not exactly. The Kepler cards are simply slower. They are not capped or anything, this is just the best they can do. I read somewhere that newer cards like the 780 might improve this, if/when they become available.

How far is the OpenCL issues with the ATI from being resolved? Is the 7970 a viable option over a GTX?

I still don't have a definite answer to that; the guys at AMD are still on it. Progress is being made, from what I know, but I don't know exact performance numbers.

Best regards,
Vlado

[Alan Iglesias]

The only thing I would add to what Vlado said is that Mike Estes of nVidia told me at Siggraph that GPU rendering was something that they will be concentrating on for their "professional" offerings...you know, like quadro, tesla, etc. If they can make them any faster, core for core, than the current Kepler, that sure would be nice. It seems a waste of cores that 1536 Kepler cores renders at ~5% less than the speed of 512 Fermi cores...

But as we all know, this could go anywhere and will probably go in the direction that nVidia feels will make the most money. I tried to tell him that a relatively inexpensive, fast rendering GPU board (like improving on the Fermi style core) would sell him a ton of hardware, but he was unimpressed with my assesment to say the least.

I should have told him that I was assessing this stuff professionally when he was still a teenage punk kid playing Wolfenstein with his little game-fanboy friends...but it wouldn't have made any difference...Ha!

Rant over...

-Alan

Oh yeah...and the fellow (project manager type) I spoke to from AMD seemed very interested in providing a solution so I hope to heck that he was serious...time will tell...