Since I built my new system last year I have relegated by old Intel quad core to being a crunching box, running SETI, Milkyway, and Collatz. Since the 4890 that was in it was getting a bit long in the tooth, I decided a little upgrade to the video card would help immensely. I found a 7870 GHz Edition for a decent price, and didn't figure there would be problems, because the card did support double precision calcs. Dear oh dear, was I shocked when I started running the programs again.

Now, being the tech I am I figured I just had remnants of the old driver still on the system, so I ran the uninstall again, used a driver sweeper program, and ran Ccleaner to make sure all traces of the old driver were gone. Installed the newest driver again and....no change whatsoever. While doing a little research this morning I ran across a little information on a wiki page related to BOINC projects in general. Man was I not prepared for what I found. I found a chart listing the DP GFlop capabilities for ATi/AMD cards. While a 4890 wasn't listed, there was a 4870x2. OK, it's not rocket science, I basically halved the GFlop values to get the output of one card, but also accounted for my 4890s faster clock. Here's what I found.

4870x2: 480 GFlop

OC'd 4890 (estimated): ~240-250 GFlop

7890 GHz Ed.: 190 GFlop

That's right. A current generation, performance level card, being outperformed by a card three generations older to the tune of 50-60 GFlops in DP calcs.

What's up with that?