主题：【原创】【讨论】如此强大的图形芯片，我们可以挪作它用吗？ -- Highway

讲述了ATI GPU在物理以及生物研究中的两个成功例子。

ATI practically kicked off its press event for the Radeon X1000 series with a physics demo running on a Radeon graphics card. Rich Heye, VP and GM of ATI's Desktop Business Unit, showed off a simulation of rolling ocean waves comparing physics performance on a CPU versus a GPU. The CPU-based version of the demo was slow and choppy, while the Radeon churned through the simulation well enough to make the waves flow, er, fluidly. The GPU, he proclaimed, is very good for physics work, and he threw out some impressive FLOPS numbers to accentuate the point. A Pentium 4 at 3GHz, he said, peaks out at 12 GFLOPS and has 5.96GB/s of memory bandwidth. By contrast, a Radeon X1800 XT can reach 83 GFLOPS and has 42GB/s of memory bandwidth.

This demonstration was more important as a statement of position and direction for ATI than anything else. NVIDIA has been rather enigmatic about any plans for physics processing, and has seemed to step out of AGEIA's way for the most part, welcoming the PhysX effort as another means of improving PC gaming. ATI is clearly ready and willing to take on AGEIA's PhysX card by using its GPUs for physics simulation, and the company believes that the more general programmability of its Shader Model 3.0 implementation in the Radeon X1000 series could make it a viable competitor there. There was talk of a CrossFire dual-GPU config in a split setup, with one GPU handling graphics and the other handling physics for certain games, and somebody present even suggested the possibility of a third GPU on a PCI card dedicated to physics processing. The folks from ATI seemed to like this suggestion.

另外一个例子：

...One of the most exciting was an implementation of the GROMACS library that's used for protein folding, as in Folding@Home. Although the GROMACS implementation wasn't yet optimized for the Radeon X1000 series and still used Pixel Shader 2.0b, the Radeon X1800 XT was already performing between 2.5 and 3.5 times faster than a Pentium 4 3GHz processor. The GeForce 7800 GTX didn't fare so well, achieving only about half the speed of the P4 3GHz. Houston offered a laundry list of things that GPGPU developers need from graphics chip makers, including better information about how to program the GPU and more direct access to the hardware.