which set of drivers for my 4870?

treepop · Oct 24, 2010

I noticed AMD(ATI) has 2 sets of comprehensive drivers for my card.

Catalyst Software Suite (64 bit) English Only

and

AMD Catalyst™ Accelerated Parallel Processing (APP) Technology Edition

I am mainly playing Starcraft 2... Which drivers should I grab?

Thanks :grouphug:

I.M.O.G. · Oct 25, 2010

The APP version includes openCL, which you don't need for starcraft.

It could speed up other applications which can use hardware acceleration in compute intensive tasks - opencl in regards to graphics cards is used for gpu compute operations. Its used for things like multimedia work and could be used in encoding/decoding stuff to speed things up. Its similar in nature to directcompute or cuda if you are familiar with either of those.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCL

The APP version, I believe, includes everything the other version does, and an additional <10MB of stuff for the OpenCL thing.

treepop · Oct 25, 2010

I.M.O.G. said:
The APP version includes openCL, which you don't need for starcraft.

It could speed up other applications which can use hardware acceleration in compute intensive tasks - opencl in regards to graphics cards is used for gpu compute operations. Its used for things like multimedia work and could be used in encoding/decoding stuff to speed things up. Its similar in nature to directcompute or cuda if you are familiar with either of those.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCL

The APP version, I believe, includes everything the other version does, and an additional <10MB of stuff for the OpenCL thing.

I wonder if openCL will help my lightroom 3 performance!

That would be very cool....though it is already very snappy.

Thanks for the reply I.M.O.G.

I.M.O.G. · Oct 25, 2010

I'm guessing no from a quick look I did. It would help CS4 though, atleast beta (research that further to confirm if that interests you).

We were curious how the Lightroom crew approached the performance issue after seeing how the CS4 engineers tapped into OpenCL programming and GPU processing. But the new system requirements, if not a surprise, suggest they haven't gone there yet. And, in fact, Hogarty confirmed "Lightroom does not utilize the GPU in the same way that PS CS4 does."

http://www.imaging-resource.com/SOFT/LR3/LR3B.HTM

treepop · Nov 2, 2010

I.M.O.G. said:
I'm guessing no from a quick look I did. It would help CS4 though, atleast beta (research that further to confirm if that interests you).

http://www.imaging-resource.com/SOFT/LR3/LR3B.HTM

Awesome info. Thank you :attn:

I.M.O.G. · Nov 2, 2010

No problem. GPU compute tasks was a topic of heavy focus at the AMD press event I went to a couple weeks ago - it is something they and many AMD partners who develop software are interested in.

which set of drivers for my 4870?

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