Those extra pixels do need extra horsepower to drive them, plus the extra memory. And yes, many professional 3D apps can readily make use of 4K and 8K resolutions right away today: whether it is 3D city modelling, or detailed engine assembly review, or complex molecular interaction simulations. The capability to drive two 8K displays, plus the allowance for larger in-memory compute jobs to use all those teraflops without slowing down to cross over PCIe, demands greater local memory. For instance, the AMD Radeon R7 290X has 4 GB RAM, while its equivalent, the FirePro W9100, has a whopping 16 GB. OpenGL professional cards also have between two and four times more local memory than the consumer ones. The full OpenGL functionality enabling of the professional GPUs leads not only to, say, triple the OpenGL benchmark advantage, but also the proper OpenGL application operation necessary to pass all the expensive professional apps certification procedures and driver optimizations – one of the reasons, besides the margin aims, why those cards cost four to five times more than their consumer brethren with similar chips.
And that’s where the difference between otherwise identical GPU dies on the consumer and professional card varieties comes in. While DirectX, for better or worse, dominates the PC 3D graphics landscape, the inherently more reliable and precise OpenGL is the API of choice for most professional applications. Sure, Intel’s Larabee was originally targeted at this same market, but, as we all know, failed and moved to the HPC area for pure compute, where it thrives now. Since the first graphics processors that hardwired the basic display operations of displays like the NEC 7220 and Hitachi 63484 in the early 1980s, they were followed by the first PC cards – the IBM PGA – some 30 years ago, the need for dedicated graphics processing hardware has set in firmly at the high end of the PC landscape.Īt that time it was 2D only, yet it still cost a couple of grand per adapter card: a price class that has seemingly kept to this day, if talking about professional graphics cards like the ones from Nvidia and AMD that are included in this roundup review.Īfter the loss of the original Silicon Graphics, as well as the other two major independent true OpenGL focused 3D professional GPU chip brands ( 3DLabs and E&S), which was a big loss in terms of features and capabilities of those processors, what we have today is the duopoly of Nvidia and AMD/ATI in this space.
0 kommentar(er)
