ATI newbie's question about OpenCL and 7970?

[f847]

Hi again, after the last thread, i have changed my mind to the 7970.

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/372632-15-asus-evga



But i am completely new to ATI cards.

I have read something about the "7970 has OpenCL", and i really wonder what it is, and mainly how to use that?

Does it come with the driver and runs this "OpenCL" automatically, or i need to install some extra programs?

Correct me if i am wrong.

Thanks.

 

[f847]

what is a ghz edition? does that mean a over-clocked card?

 

[COLGeek]

OpenCL support is provided when you install the AMD drivers. Get them from:

http://support.amd.com/us/Pages/AMDSupportHub.aspx

For more on what OpenCL is/does. Go here:

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

 

[COLGeek]

what is a ghz edition? does that mean a over-clocked card?

Yes, that is a factory overclocked edition.

 

[mafisometal]

OpenCL is nothing to really worry about because both AMD and NVidia utilize it in the more current games. It's mostly for compensation of OpenGL and DirectX limitations. It tries to fill in the gap from what it misses from one or the other.

Ghz edition is a special factory overclocked model of the card. If you buy an aftermarket vendor model, it most likely will be overclocked pretty close to the Ghz edition. It's usually a 5-10% performance increase from the original clocked model. I would say buy the regular version by an aftermarket manufacturer like ASUS,MSI or Gigabyte and you can overclock the card to the Ghz edition specifications. That will save you some money.

 

[luciferano]

OpenCL is nothing to really worry about because both AMD and NVidia utilize it in the more current games. It's mostly for compensation of OpenGL and DirectX limitations. It tries to fill in the gap from what it misses from one or the other.

Ghz edition is a special factory overclocked model of the card. If you buy an aftermarket vendor model, it most likely will be overclocked pretty close to the Ghz edition. It's usually a 5-10% performance increase from the original clocked model. I would say buy the regular version by an aftermarket manufacturer like ASUS,MSI or Gigabyte and you can overclock the card to the Ghz edition specifications. That will save you some money.

Most current games don't use OpenCL much, if at all. Those that use compute generally use Direct Compute, not OpenCL. OpenGL is not used at all in most games.

GHz Edition is not a factory overclocked card. IDK where you people got such information, but it's wrong. The only GHz Edition that can even be considered that is the 7970 GHz Edition and even then, it's not really a factory overclocked 7970, it has a different feature set and such.

EDIT: Also, Nvidia doesn't really support OpenCL on their desktop cards anyway.

 

[f847]

All questions been answered, thank you to everyone

 

[f847]

Actually there is one more question, is OpenCL support only in MAC and not windows?

 

[luciferano]

Actually there is one more question, is OpenCL support only in MAC and not windows?

I know for a fact that Windows supports OpenCL so long as your graphics and graphics drivers support it. I don't think that Apple supports it, so you probably have it the wrong way around.