GPU for CFE/CE/QCC

Xittenn

HD7970 vs FirePro V8800

Is there any reason why I should not go with the AMD Radeon™ HD7970 Graphics? I mean it's a popping 970GFlops DP, which I think satisfies my needs and then some.

I will be working with OpenFOAM or OpenCL, and my own variant of CFD/CE with my own pre and post processing meshing suite. I don't know much about the drivers, because it isn't something I'm all that interested in, and so I'm not clear on what changes are made between the professional and the desktop drivers that affect performance. I assume much of this has to do with vector/scalar manipulation and optimizing the usage of the accumulators/registers.

I want to do a lot of this sort of thing!

I guess what I'm saying is, are the drivers tailored to the application, or the specific softwares themselves? Is it that the driver is tailored to CFE/CAD/CAE, or is it that the driver is tailored to Solid Works, AutoCAD, CATIA and so on . . . .

Routaran

The HD line of cards have drivers built that are optimized for directX, mostly for gaming. Its still able to handle the demand of say CAD.
The firepro on the other hand is designed specifically for CAD and other processor intensive tasks and will generally perform better than the HD line even though on paper they might not appear to be as good.

Routaran	The HD line of cards have drivers built that are optimized for directX, mostly for gaming. Its still able to handle the demand of say CAD. The firepro on the other hand is designed specifically for CAD and other processor intensive tasks and will generally perform better than the HD line even though on paper they might not appear to be as good.