OpenCL: Rendering Performance
LuxMark vs. RatGPU
Meet two different rendering engines that take different approaches. First, there's the popular LuxRender, on which LuxMark is based. This one finally attracted Nvidia's attention after showing up time and again as a weak spot for the company's GeForce and Quadro cards. RatGPU, on the other hand, didn't need that special attention; Nvidia's offerings did well in it right out of the gate.
LuxRender demonstrates that Nvidia's cards do support OpenCL fairly well, if there's no CUDA option. AMD once enjoyed a significant performance advantage in this test, though the magnitude of its wins is shrinking. The following charts represent LuxMark at three difficulty settings:
The FirePro cards land in order of their shader performance for simple single-precision tasks. This changes as the workloads get more complex, allowing the FirePro W8100 to draw even with Nvidia’s Quadro K6000.
Conversely, AMD’s graphics cards don’t do as well in ratGPU. This benchmark isn’t one that gets much attention. Consequently, the two large graphics card vendors don't appear to optimize for it.
Regardless, the rendering approach seems to favor Nvidia’s cards. We once again choose three different difficulty levels.
