Benchmark Results: MediaEspresso, Luxmark 2.0, Bitmining
If these numbers seem vaguely familiar, it’s because we saw them once before in our Radeon HD 7700 series launch. After emailing back and forth with the helpful folks at CyberLink, we established that, at some point, AMD had pulled a couple of DLLs from its drivers, preventing MediaEspresso from utilizing hardware-accelerated encoding.
Now we see that support for accelerated encoding is available again. However, performance does not change.
It’s insane that we were able to test this feature and demonstrate its benefit more than a year ago when Intel’s second-gen Core processor first launched (Intel’s Second-Gen Core CPUs: The Sandy Bridge Review), and it’s now completely broken in multiple successive driver builds for some reason.
We use LuxMark to help evaluate the compute potential of AMD’s Radeon HD 7000-series cards, and our findings with the 7800s confirms GCN’s strengths in this discipline. The Radeon HD 7850 is the fourth-fastest card in AMD’s new line-up and it beats the Radeon HD 6970, last year’s top-of-the-line single-GPU flagship.
AMD’s Radeon cards are the favorites for Bitcoin miners. Although the 7800s continue outpacing anything from Nvidia, they don’t overtake the 6900-series cards. It’s probable that the client’s implementation of OpenCL differs from LuxMark’s.
