Shalmanese
Platinum Member
I have a friend who want's to do some moderately non-trivial image processing work in real time on a cluster of machines and he's figured out a neat way to do it in shaders (mainly pixel shaders) that should give him a nice performance boost. He was wondering what sort of hardware currently would give the most shader bang for the least amount of bucks. One thing that is vitally important is that the card must support fast read off the video RAM. I did some work with him a while back developing some shader apps and, on my mobility FireGL T2 which apparently supports fast video reading, my app was running at ~23fps. On his desktop Radeon 9700, performance was around 1.3fps.
I'm assuming that PCIE cards would allow fast reading but AGP doesn't in general? Would SLI be worth the price or is it cheaper just to get 2 machines? All the machines are going to run off a central file server so a fast network card is essential but CPU, RAM and HD should all be relatively unimportant.
He's looking around 10 - 15 machines in total.
I'm assuming that PCIE cards would allow fast reading but AGP doesn't in general? Would SLI be worth the price or is it cheaper just to get 2 machines? All the machines are going to run off a central file server so a fast network card is essential but CPU, RAM and HD should all be relatively unimportant.
He's looking around 10 - 15 machines in total.
