anyone tried, or seen any benchmarks of the new radeon 7970 with RT?

[super gnu]

not actually released yet of course.. but has an entirely new architecture apparently. heres hoping its a great opencl monster.

[vlado]

Hopefully

Best regards,
Vlado

[super gnu]

still nobody managed to test this card? im assuming it will be afflicted by the same issues that previous ati cards though is this down to drivers or what? sorry that question has probably been answered a million times.

[Alan Iglesias]

Heya Gnu,

Y'know, the bottom line here is that these video card folks have got to see some sort of gain by supporting OpenCL with their GPU cards before they will put any developer resources into the situation. And yes, that is at least part in the drivers, for that is where the Vray/OpenCL calls get transformed into something that the card can understand. I truly hope that ATI gets more into this because as you surely realize, competition is important when you want to keep prices down.

As far as GPU rendering is concerned, I do not want nVidia to be the only game in town because that would cause a monopoly effect. It's bad enough that as time goes on nVidia will probably put the largest amounts of RAM only in their expensive "pro" cards as they identify the GPU rendering market. We do not need anything making that worse than it already will probably be.

So I hope that ATI will get in there and really support us! It's the only way to keep this stuff affordable.

Just my .02$...

-Alan

[vlado]

still nobody managed to test this card? im assuming it will be afflicted by the same issues that previous ati cards though is this down to drivers or what? sorry that question has probably been answered a million times.

I posted this another thread... I tried it, but the video driver crashed.

Best regards,
Vlado

[super gnu]

oh dear.. so much for the new architecture.. im surprised they are not more ontop of this.. or are other gpgpu apps not having the same issues? what with nvidia owning mental images (not that theyve done much with it) youd think amd would be well up for supporting the alternatives. i guess its just too small a market (although a great one for giving gpu performance presentations!!! hint hint!)


as Alan says.. i hate the fact we are stuck with one supplier at the mo. esp. since theoretically the amd cards should be screamers for this purpose.

[vlado]

oh dear.. so much for the new architecture.. im surprised they are not more ontop of this.. or are other gpgpu apps not having the same issues? what with nvidia owning mental images (not that theyve done much with it) youd think amd would be well up for supporting the alternatives.

They did make the effort; we got them V-Ray as well as the V-Ray RT GPU source code to look at and they got it working at one point for some of the cards. Not sure what happened afterwards...

Best regards,
Vlado