CUDA cores vs. Radeon cores

[Generic User #2]

Hey all,

this isn't really a question; i have a request. Does anyone know of an article that teaches people that you can't compare nvidia's GPU cores to ATI's cores* on a 1 to 1 basis?

I have a friend that refuses to believe that a dual-gpu card (of the last generation) can be beat by a single GPU card (of the most recent generation) when the former has more cores than the latter(which is almost all of the time). Yes, this is in DIRECT contradiction of real benchmarks.

can anyone link me to such an article?

*it will forever be ATI to me...

[GalaxyTech]

If a dozen counts of irrefutable evidence isn't doing it for him I think you have a windmill fight here...

In answer to your question, I have only ever found discussions on this, no actual articles. I would tell your friend the same thing I'd tell someone in regards to any single spec on a GPU or CPU. Specs are specs, and results are results. Specs are good indicators, but results are what matters. Ask him if a 3Ghz CPU is always faster than a 2Ghz CPU. Basically the same argument.

[dandelioneater]

Originally Posted by Generic User #2

I have a friend that refuses to believe that a dual-gpu card (of the last generation) can be beat by a single GPU card (of the most recent generation)

^^But isn't that true. ex: 590 (sli enabled) will surely beat a 680 in games.

[SKYMTL]

Actually, take the Kepler architectural analysis we did in the GTX 680 article and place it alongside the GCN info from the HD 7970 article. Read through them and you will see just how drastic the differences are. Everything from fixed function stages to the caching hierarchy to NVIDIA's use of dedicated load / store units.

[Generic User #2]

Originally Posted by dandelioneater

^^But isn't that true. ex: 590 (sli enabled) will surely beat a 680 in games.

he saw a benchmark where the 680 beat the 6990 :/

[frontier204]

Originally Posted by GalaxyTech

If a dozen counts of irrefutable evidence isn't doing it for him I think you have a windmill fight here...

That pretty much sums it up. If that person really just wants to maximize core count, then have him or her get a Radeon 4870x2 which has 800+800 cores and try to make it beat a GTX 680 and its 1536 cores
For extra fun throw in an AMD Bulldozer overclocked to the max (that's a lot of cores at high clock speed, right?) and laugh at the power bill when it comes in. (EDIT: This is under the assumption that the person has some rational brain cells - I'm trying to introduce a massive contradiction.)

[NyteOwl]

Actually that's not a fair comparison because the Bulldozer is a great CPU - for a purpose, that is running multiple virtual machines per processor. As a general desktop CPU it's not so great, but then again AMD never intended it to be.