Please, Help A Rational Brother Out?

[gigabytecoin]

Hello Bitcoiners!

You would not believe the overpowering feelings of joy, freedom, and enthusiasm I felt when I stumbled onto this wonderful idea that is Bitcoin.

I love reading about math, computers, money, and the internet. That, and bank fees really get under my skin for some reason. So I wanted to first say THANK YOU for contributing to it's cause.

Now for my question... what's up with this graph??? > http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html

I tend to think their CPU benchmarking sister site is fairly accurate: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html

So then tell me, guru bitcoiners... Why is it that a GeForce GTX 580 (apparantly clocking in at 3,819 somethings...? and their fastest GPU... cost ~$500) is worse at generating bitcoins than the Radeon HD 5970 (apparently clocking in at 2,599 somethings...? cost ~$900)?

The only correlation I can come up with is price. 5970 costs more, so it's better...

Does that mean that the Quadro 6000 (cost ~$3,800) would be even better still?

Thoughts?

[jkminkov]

read all @ www.bitcoin.it

[[Tycho]]

Does that mean that the Quadro 6000 (cost ~$3,800) would be even better still?

Quadro may be even worse because Quaros use the same GPUs as GeForce, but at lower frequency and with drivers optimized for quality instead of speed.

[gusti]

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_Hardware_Comparison

[SmokeTooMuch]

Afaik:

nvidia -> optimized for floating-point operations
ati/amd -> optimized for integer operations

hashing -> integer operation

[xenon481]

Afaik:

nvidia -> optimized for floating-point operations
ati/amd -> optimized for integer operations

hashing -> integer operation

This is the correct answer.

[TurboK]

Actually, it's just that Radeons have more shaders. It's why the 5870 outdoes the 6970 in mining, even though the 6970 is better in games.

[gigabytecoin]

Thanks for all of the replies guys.

Just what do you think they're benchmarking exactly then on that website in my OP?

[xenon481]

Thanks for all of the replies guys.

Just what do you think they're benchmarking exactly then on that website in my OP?

The entire gamut of typical types of operations that games utilize. Not the extremely small subset of operations that hashing requires.

[os008]

nvidia -> optimized for floating-point operations
ati/amd -> optimized for integer operations

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_ATI_Graphics_Processing_Units#PCIe_.28HD_5xxx.29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_NVIDIA_graphics_processing_units#GeForce_400_Series

I don't really understand what FMA is, but from what i could gather it's just double precision, right? So basically, if we take 2 cards that cost nearly the same, and have nearly the same performance in games; 5850 and 460GTX, the GTX has 907 DP GFLOPS, and the 5850 has 417 DP GFLOPS. Is that correct?

[Jered Kenna (TradeHill)]

Thanks for all of the replies guys.

Just what do you think they're benchmarking exactly then on that website in my OP?

The entire gamut of typical types of operations that games utilize. Not the extremely small subset of operations that hashing requires.

What he said, basically it's a assigning a number (that you can compare to other computer setups) about how well it ran the game. It's essentially pushing the card how a game would and recording it's response. Naturally that is going to include a lot of things we never would use and be mostly irrelevant.