The 4870 I'm using is still working fine but the 8800GTS 320 in the third PC is showing its age and my wife's 9800GTX+ 512 is seriously weak for the 22" screen she's running. In fact Sims 3 has to be ran on low to medium settings to obtain a playable fps. Now I'm looking at getting a cheap replacement for my card, as I don't really want to spend too much. I was looking at the 6800's but they lack DP/fp64 ability. So, my attention's turned to the GTX460 1GB but have seen that their DP runs at 1/12th of their SP. That makes them very weak compared with AMD's offerings but what's the efficiency of these cards? I'm asking because a while ago someone mentioned somewhere that AMD cards never achieve their full ability, due to the way they work. I have no idea whether this is true, so I'd like to know whether anyone knows whether the GTX460 could match my 4870 in FP64 GFloppage? Reason why I'm interested in DP is that I have no intentions of folding with the card, I am married to BOINC and run Collatz and MW@Home. After posting my question I found this: Chart comparing video cards in Passmark. Am I correct in understanding that the GTX460 is more powerful as a GPGPU card than the 4870?
I have already found the answer in this thread. Only 1/12 of a GTX460's FP32 may be used for FP64 but it's still more efficient than the approach AMD took with the 4800's. An overclocked 460 calculates a WU in 10 mins, whereas my 4870 takes 13 minutes in Collatz. The Hawk 460 really looks sexy now.
Thats kind of interseting. Never knew about Collatz until I saw this post. Do they plan to stop that crunching program at a certain point? You can theoreticaly go forever.
