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When will ATi be doing the multithreaded driver action?

J

Jerunk

Limp Gawd
Joined
Sep 22, 2004
Messages
478
Nvidia has already released theirs and I'm waiting anxiously for a Catalyst driver for my Xeons to take advantage of.

Will we ever actually see it?
 
There's already a test implementation in the new 5.9s Don't know how far along it is but it's something that they're definitely working on to implement soon by the looks of it.
 
By Multi-threaded, like Intels Hyper-Threading. Drivers that will take adavantage of that?
 
Lazy_Moron said:
By Multi-threaded, like Intels Hyper-Threading. Drivers that will take adavantage of that?
Click to expand...

No, multi-threaded means if you have an actual dual core CPU it will take advantage of the second core to boost performance. However, it's a non-issue in GPU limited games as the card can only do so much whether you have 1 core or 16. If the game is CPU limited on the other hand a nice boost may occur.
 
I was on the driverheaven forums and I saw some of the Multithreaded Nvidia driver benchmarks, with SLi it actually gave a boost of around 500-600 points in 3dmark05, which is a nice little boost for no hardware change.

The problem is I know how slow ATi is with everything.
 
Jerunk said:
I was on the driverheaven forums and I saw some of the Multithreaded Nvidia driver benchmarks, with SLi it actually gave a boost of around 500-600 points in 3dmark05, which is a nice little boost for no hardware change.

The problem is I know how slow ATi is with everything.
Click to expand...

No, the real problem is that 3dmark isn't a game so it has no relevance. Like I said above, that's assuming you have a CPU limited game.
 
I understand that 3dmark05 isn't a game, but it is a benchmark, and the benchmarks show an improvement. I like to have all the extra performance I can get, especially if it just requires me updating a driver.

I don't have 3dmark installed and I probably never will for a long time.
 
Jerunk said:
The problem is I know how slow ATi is with everything.
Click to expand...

The only thing ATi has been slow with is the R520. They are never slow with drivers.... or anything else really for that matter.
 
Nvidias drivers have always been better.

I'm not here to start an arguement, I just want multithreaded drivers heh.
 
Jerunk said:
Well they never innovate, and Nvidias drivers have always been better.

I'm not here to start an arguement, I just want multithreaded drivers heh.
Click to expand...

Please, at least have some knowledge on the matters of which you speak. They "never" innovate shows a lack of knowledge as to the subject you are talking about.
 
Well, just to keep us on topic, when are the 5.10's expected and what can we expect to see from them?
 
Jerunk said:
Well, just to keep us on topic, when are the 5.10's expected and what can we expect to see from them?
Click to expand...

Per the usual, around a month after the last release although there are 8.x beta drivers floating around. They're for the new x1x00 allegedly but the inf has been modded for the x8x0 series.
 
OldBoy said:
No, multi-threaded means if you have an actual dual core CPU it will take advantage of the second core to boost performance. However, it's a non-issue in GPU limited games as the card can only do so much whether you have 1 core or 16. If the game is CPU limited on the other hand a nice boost may occur.
Click to expand...
Incorrect.

The point of the "multi-threaded" drivers is to have the graphics card take advantage of the dual cores.

What happens in a standard system is that when a game runs, the driver spins off a thread to do all the work it needs to do. Only a SINGLE thread, however, and it exists on the same core as the game process does (always). These newer multi-threaded drivers are spinning off MULTIPLE threads, and seeing to it that they are divided amongst the CPUs.

Further, nVidia took this one step further with theirs, and unloaded some of the vertex calculations previously done by the video card onto the second (less used) CPU. Since nVidia's cards were more vertex-limited compared to ATI's, the running theory is that their multi-threaded drivers are going to be seeing a bigger boost than when ATI finally does it.

But it'll still offer SOMETHING.

And it has nothing at all to do with how games use the CPU.
 
dderidex said:
Incorrect.

The point of the "multi-threaded" drivers is to have the graphics card take advantage of the dual cores.

What happens in a standard system is that when a game runs, the driver spins off a thread to do all the work it needs to do. Only a SINGLE thread, however, and it exists on the same core as the game process does (always). These newer multi-threaded drivers are spinning off MULTIPLE threads, and seeing to it that they are divided amongst the CPUs.

Further, nVidia took this one step further with theirs, and unloaded some of the vertex calculations previously done by the video card onto the second (less used) CPU. Since nVidia's cards were more vertex-limited compared to ATI's, the running theory is that their multi-threaded drivers are going to be seeing a bigger boost than when ATI finally does it.

But it'll still offer SOMETHING.

And it has nothing at all to do with how games use the CPU.
Click to expand...



Thanks for that clarification.
 
I hope we get something to play with soon, I'm getting bored waiting here heh.

I tried DHZeropoints drivers which claim to be multithreaded but I get weird artifacting in DOD Source so I dropped them for the omegas.
 
eastvillager said:
Hopefully they apply more effort to it than they have to opengl performance.
Click to expand...

I'm sure they will. I don't blame them for their lack of attention to OpenGL as gaming wise it's pretty dead. You have id and a couple of other guys but almost every major title now is DX9 so why waste the time coding for something not many people are going to care about. For example, this holiday season outside of Quake IV (which from early reviews is said to be crap) and Serious Sam II (I think) all the AAA titles are DirectX (F.E.A.R., CoD2, Oblivion, Age of Empires III, The Movies, Black & White 2, Star Wars: Empire at War, X3: The Reunion)

That said, ATI has mentioned that they are nearing the end of the project to optimize their OpenGL drivers so that is good news.
 
Well the Graphics card has to communicate with the rest of the computer too.
 
Not seeing anything about multithreading in the 5.10 changelog, guess we'll have to wait for the 5.11's heh.
 
They better release them soon, I am loving my dual-core setup but every bit helps.
 
Is there any way to petition ati for multithreading and an opengl rewrite? I'm not convinced these things are being worked on very seriously or at all.
 
Still waiting, has anyone seen a beta multithreaded driver floating around?
 
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