Tuesday, February 18, 2014

Maxwell further lowers double precision performance for GeForce GPUs

Now this double precision mockery seems to have no end. For top end Fermi based GPUs the ratio was 1/8 which was just acceptable. For the rest Fermi GPUs the ratio became 1/12. Thereafter, Kepler further reduced it to 1/24. And today we learn that the first Maxwell GPUs further cut it to 1/32!

As long as NVidia wants to sell as more Teslas as it gets we will never be able to achieve acceptable performance in double precision arithmetic from consumer cards. Actually, using a consumer GPU (excluding GTX Titan) for a compute intensive problem does not worth considering the CPU improvements with 256bit AVX2 plus the addition of FMA instructions. And certainly not everyones has 1000$ to waste for a GTX Titan. I would expect a decent double precision performance from a mid-range card of, lets say 300$, but unfortunately that's not the case.

I hope the next architecture dubbed Volta will not emply a 1/128 ratio though it doesn't actually make much difference if it is 1/32, 1/64 or 1/128. These ratios turn double precision compute on consumer cards meaningless.

Source: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/geforce-gtx-750-ti-review,3750.html#xtor=RSS-182

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