Graphics cards & HPC : how to interpretate the Passmark score ?

[B612]

Hi guys,
I have a hard time understanding the impact/ consequence of the passmark final score to choose my next piece of hardware : I need a graphic card in order to perform photogrammetry calcul. There is a step during the process where GPU calcul is involved and thus shorten the processing time required. I am probably wrong, but can we say than considering every other pieces of hardware are identical, a system equiped with a graphic card with a passmark score of let say 10,000 will divide by a factor of 2 the time of calcul compared with a machine equiped with a graphic card with a passmark score of 5,000 ?

If not, how can these passmark scores can be useful in my case, and what * should be a difference in term of passmark score * to get a significant reduction of time of calcul ? This is really the only factor which interests me. I need to be able to know how much time I will save in order to know if the investment is really worthy, buying one or another graphic card.

Thanks for your help.

[David (PassMark)]

Roughly speaking a machine with a 3DMark that is double another machine could process twice the data.

But in the real world it depends a LOT on the exact software you are using. In this case your photogrammetry software package. You might find it can't take full advantage of high end hardware, or is very dependant on the amount of video RAM and not so much dependant on the clock speed. Really depends on the algorithm they use. And their algorithm might even change between releases of their software and might also vary with the job you are processing (the specific task you are doing).

So if the only use for the machine is to run a single software package, the best benchmarks will be measurements taken from that exact software package doing the exact operation that you plan to do.