GPU potential still limited by CPU?

vraxtusvraxtus
Posted:
in Current Mac Hardware edited January 2014
While the speed increases brought by the G5s seem like they will be more capable of pushing enough data to the GPU's it still seems like a high end card (such as the Rad 9800) would only really be worth using in a dualie.



Forgive me if I'm wrong but it seems like limiting of many applications (games in particular) is a result of CPU speeds. In the case of the lower end G5s, the 1.6 and 1.8, I'd imagine that a lot of the potential of these GPUs is really being wasted...



Any thoughts? Still considering bumping up the Rad 9600 to a 9800 but only when it comes out as 8x retail.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 5
    spazspaz Posts: 58member
    i'm not exactly sure what you're talking about, but i got the dualie AND the Radeon 9800, so i'm happy.
  • Reply 2 of 5
    vraxtusvraxtus Posts: 19member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by spaz

    i'm not exactly sure what you're talking about, but i got the dualie AND the Radeon 9800, so i'm happy.



    If you look at a lot of benchmarking scores, FPS rates for a lot of games cap at a certain rate, no matter what resolution they're running at. In those cases, it's a clear indication that the game is CPU bound, therefore whatever graphics card you have is really *not* going to make a difference. In that way the cap is a result of the CPU not being able to route enough data to the GPU, hence lower framerates. That explains why PCs using the same cards at higher mhz are getting better framerates.



    I'm wondering then if the G5s now are going to be able to push more data to the GPU to process = higher framerates. To me it seems like slapping a 9800 in a 1.6 is a complete waste of money, because the card won't be performing anywhere near it's full potential.
  • Reply 3 of 5
    stoostoo Posts: 1,490member
    If you have rendering power to spare, then you can always use antialiasing/high quality texture filtering without a drop in performance .
  • Reply 4 of 5
    kim kap solkim kap sol Posts: 2,987member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by vraxtus

    If you look at a lot of benchmarking scores, FPS rates for a lot of games cap at a certain rate, no matter what resolution they're running at. In those cases, it's a clear indication that the game is CPU bound, therefore whatever graphics card you have is really *not* going to make a difference. In that way the cap is a result of the CPU not being able to route enough data to the GPU, hence lower framerates. That explains why PCs using the same cards at higher mhz are getting better framerates.



    I'm wondering then if the G5s now are going to be able to push more data to the GPU to process = higher framerates. To me it seems like slapping a 9800 in a 1.6 is a complete waste of money, because the card won't be performing anywhere near it's full potential.



    Well keep in mind that some 1.6 G5 benchmarks indicate that it's about as fast as a mid-high end P4. And with it's impressive bandwidth why would label slapping a 9800 in a 1.6 a 'complete waste of money' and 'not perform anywhere near it's full potential'.



    If anything it'll be performing close to it's full potential and just be a very slight waste of money.
  • Reply 5 of 5
    drboardrboar Posts: 477member
    That CPU-GPU limitation is very game dependent. To take one extreme Quake 3 were a weak CPU (500 MHz G4) and good graphcial card (ATI 8500/9000). On other games like SOF II and UT2003 the CPU can hardly be fast enough.



    And game habits dependent as well:

    If you insist on playing games at 1600x1200 the GPU requirements are vastly different than one running at 1024x768



    An ATI 9800 in a G4/350 and a ATI 128 in a dual G5 2.0 both look like very unmatched setups but apart from those it really depend on the game and gaming habits
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