So, VizWorld has risen to the level to be noticed by some rather prominent companies, and we have recently been given the chance to review some Video Cards from various manufacturers. While I’m not at liberty to discuss details (yet!), I’m curious to see what kind of benchmarks you would like to see posted here on VizWorld? Currently I’m using:
- 3dMark (I’m currently using `06, since I’m running on an XP64 machine, but plan to rev up to a newer one on Windows 7 soon)
- The new SPECViewPerf
I’ve been trying to build application benchmarks with tools like ParaView & VisIt, but not having much luck (they seem heavily throttled by GUI updates, so better GPU’s make almost no improvement). I also want to try some OpenCL code, can anyone recommend anything particularly intense?
Post suggestions in the comments!
vapor (http://www.ucar.vapor.edu) can exercise the GPU with its direct and indirect volume rendering. There are some limited frame rate profiling (compile-time) options that can be enabled. There are several example data sets available on the website. And I can provide you much larger ones, if you’re interested.
With OpenCL (or any benchmark, really) you have to be able to compare optimized and naive implementations. If you can tweak an OpenCL kernel to run 5% faster on a specific family of GPU’s, that matters to people who are running those types of kernels and are willing to optimize accordingly. But comparing a universal kernel is more applicable to those of us who aren’t willing to optimize all of our code. Both are valid.
@allanmac I was looking at some OpenCL benchmarks definitely, HashGPU sounds perfect!
@
kevin Interesting. Are these available in the Freely downloadable or trial versions?
Some non-game “compute” benchmarks would be good.
As an example, how about Ivan Golubev’s hash cracker so that you can see raw GPU speed?
http://www.golubev.com/hashgpu.htm
EnSight’s got some decent graphics card performance benchmarks, which progressively grow to soak the graphics card through increasing the amount of polygons rendered, looking at wireframe, shading, transparency, etc. rendering capability. -Kevin