Radeon 5970

[godfather]

Hello,
I'm just wondering why the Radeon 5970 graphics card doesn't feature on the charts. Is it because it consits of two GPUs? Because there does seem to be a few other dual GPU graphics cards on the list and I highly doubt it's an issue of nobody uploaded results for it yet.

Thanks for clearing this up!

[Michael (Passmark)]

Thanks for pointing this out.

ATI cards are a bit problematic in that they their drivers don't report their proper name to PerformanceTest. We have to do a manual update to a lookup table for them to be included in the charts.

As such newer ATI cards can sometimes take longer to appear than normal.

This lookup is also included in PT with patches. The next version of PT should correctly identify the 5970 rather than just calling it a generic 5900 series.

Also, in regards to the 5970 and other "dual GPU" cards. PerformanceTest isn't able to fully utilise multiple GPUs and as such the scores for these cards will most likely not be much better than a single GPU equivalent (and in some cases performance degrades).

[godfather]

Thanks for the quick reply and explanation. Does PassMark have any plans to make use of dual GPU cards in the near future?

[Michael (Passmark)]

We have looked at doing it in past releases, and will most likely have another look at it in the next major release. However good documentation on supporting multiple GPUs has been hard to come by making it difficult to implement.

So in short, we'd like to do it, but it may not be practical.

[godfather]

I understand. Thanks again for the reply.

[David (PassMark)]

See also this recent post on SLI support.