What is AMD GeometryBoost?

AMD has announced a new hardware-level feature in their new FirePro V5900 and V7900 cards called “GeometryBoost”.  What is this you ask?

GeometryBoost in the new FirePro V5900 and FirePro V7900 is a unique hardware capability that processes two primitives per clock cycle.  Each graphics engine is assigned to its own shader engine, consisting of up to 10 SIMDs.  The results is a doubling in the rate of primitive & vertex processing, as well as back/front culling rates and scan conversion setup.  It also doubles early reject rates.

The new 8th generation tessellation engine improves performance up to 3X in both OpenGL 4.1 and DirectX 11.

Sounds like another feature designed to compete with Quadro and targeted at the high-end CAD space.  The last comment mentions using their new tessellation ending with OpenGL4.1 and DX11, but hopefully the “GeometryBoost” features will also offer a nice performance boost to earlier versions.

via What is AMD GeometryBoost? | FireUser Blog.

This story written by Randall Hand

Randall Hand is a visualization scientist working for a federal research lab, aiding researchers to discover the insights buried within their terabyte datasets generated on some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. He also runs VizWorld.com .