Does cuda core count still matter (GTX 780Ti)?

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Message 1819805 - Posted: 26 Sep 2016, 1:06:42 UTC
Last modified: 26 Sep 2016, 1:07:02 UTC

The GTX 780Ti has incredible 2880 cuda cores, more than the GTX 980Ti and GTX 1080.

The only other card, The Titan X has more @3072.
The Titan Z has more b/c there are 2 embedded GPUs @5760.

Would this still be a factor since now the platform is mainly openCL?

Have a look at the openCL benchmarks link:
http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-2268443/opencl-video-card.html

Its seems the Titan Black (2880 cuda cores) does well on the folding section.
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Grant (SSSF)
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Message 1819855 - Posted: 26 Sep 2016, 5:56:25 UTC - in response to Message 1819805.  
Last modified: 26 Sep 2016, 5:59:29 UTC

It's not just the number of CUDA cores, but the number of SMs (Streaming Multiprocessors (or SMXs depending on the family)). Having more CUDA cores in each SM/SMX (or Compute Unit in OpenCL) is an advantage, up to a point. What is also important is the schedulers, special function units, registers, cache & the actual architecture of the SM/SMXs. Not to mention the software being run.

A good example of this is that the present GTX 1070/1080s leave the GTX 780Ti way behind when it comes to crunching work, even though they have less CUDA cores.
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Message 1820154 - Posted: 27 Sep 2016, 10:41:28 UTC - in response to Message 1819855.  

It's not just the number of CUDA cores, but the number of SMs (Streaming Multiprocessors (or SMXs depending on the family)). Having more CUDA cores in each SM/SMX (or Compute Unit in OpenCL) is an advantage, up to a point. What is also important is the schedulers, special function units, registers, cache & the actual architecture of the SM/SMXs. Not to mention the software being run.

A good example of this is that the present GTX 1070/1080s leave the GTX 780Ti way behind when it comes to crunching work, even though they have less CUDA cores.


Sorry Grant, but from my experience the present GTX 1070s do not leave the GTX 780Ti way behind when it comes to crunching work.

I admit that I may not be being fair in my comment. I had a box that had 2 x EVGA GTX 780 TI SCs in it. I bought 2 x Gigabyte GTX 1070 FEs and swapped the cards over. Everything else has remained the same (except video driver). From my observation of the processing times on WUs (and I have watched it a lot since I swapped them over), the processing times are about the same. The next give away for me was RAC. The issues over the last week with flakey WUs have made that a bit indeterminable at the moment but from what I saw before things went a bit south, there was no significant up swing or down swing. I'm still watching this to see if there is any indication of real change.

Admittedly, I have not tried to optimise the 1070s yet as I wanted to see the effect of a direct swap out.

What I have noticed is that the box chews about 4kWh less per day (for the same apparent throughput) and I can feel the difference in the temperature in the room. Which leads me to my next test and seeing if I can run 3 of these cards in one machine on air without any significant heating issues affecting the cards performance (I have 2 more 1070s sitting in boxes behind me to test this with). This may be where their true advantage lies, in allowing more powerful cards to be inserted in a machine without the need to consider massive amounts of cooling. Anyway, it's just a thought bubble at this stage.

Lionel
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Message 1820392 - Posted: 29 Sep 2016, 5:47:40 UTC - in response to Message 1820154.  

Sorry Grant, but from my experience the present GTX 1070s do not leave the GTX 780Ti way behind when it comes to crunching work.

I admit that I may not be being fair in my comment. I had a box that had 2 x EVGA GTX 780 TI SCs in it. I bought 2 x Gigabyte GTX 1070 FEs and swapped the cards over.

To me that isn't a good comparison.
A GTX 780Ti reference edition compared to a GTX 1070 FE- yep.
A GTX 780Ti SC compared to a GTX 1070 SC- yep.

What application are you running?
If it's the CUDA50, then that in itself puts the GTX 1070 at a disadvantage. The more recent the hardware, the greater impact of the older application on it's performance.

Try running the GTX 780Ti & the GTX 1070 FE using the SoG application, without any command line settings.
Then try them with some aggressive settings. Both will have much greater WU throughput.

CUDA v OpenCL


What I have noticed is that the box chews about 4kWh less per day (for the same apparent throughput) and I can feel the difference in the temperature in the room

That's a big part of my "leaves the GTX780Ti way behind" comment- power here isn't cheap, and the power used by a card to do it's thing is a big portion of any consideration I give to the their performance.
For me, the fastest thing isn't the best if it costs 5 times as much to run, but only does double the work.
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Message 1820425 - Posted: 29 Sep 2016, 7:06:57 UTC - in response to Message 1820392.  

Grant, fair comments.

Yes I am running Cuda50 and that in itself was part of my baseline test to see what the 1070 would do even if bottle necked by an older application.

Testing with SoG was part of my next step after I got a baseline on Cuda but getting that baseline is proving problematic at the moment. I had a 780 TI blow up the other day so was thinking of re-jigging a few things before I go down that path. As part of that, I was thinking of splicing one of the spare 1070s that I have here into the box that had the dead 780 TI as it has another 780 TI running in it.

rgds
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Message boards : Number crunching : Does cuda core count still matter (GTX 780Ti)?


 
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