NVIDIA GeForce GT 710: Trying The Newest Sub-$50 GPU On Linux

[Michael]

I have to agree. If there is no one that will actually use the settings benchmarked then the benchmark doesn't show anything at all! This is just another example of why taking a little time to find the best playable settings is valuable and not a waste of time. At least then there would be something useful conveyed.

The OpenBenchmarking.org result file linked to from last page of article contains GT 710 results for many different resolutions.

[caligula]

- Enterprise quality OpenGL, OpenCL and CUDA support.

I would take this card over any integrated GPU any day.

Seriously? Aren't OpenCL and CUDA all about the performance? What exactly is so enterprise quality with the lowest end GPU performing really bad in those benchmarks? It's actually so slow that it competes with high end x86 CPUs so your Xeon system might just work as well without such a lousy external GPU.

[darkblu]

To those wondering about the target audience of such a GPU:

1. Most Xeons don't have iGPUs.
2. iGPUs share their BW with the CPU. This card adds 14.4GB/s of BW to the equation. Not much but still something.

It's not particularly hard to be BW-limited, particularly in openCL. Some of those entry-level cards (the older GT 720) come in GDDR5 variants. Now that can be a huge upgrade over anything an iGPU could provide.

[Guest]

The OpenBenchmarking.org result file linked to from last page of article contains GT 710 results for many different resolutions.

I can't find it. Could you please post the OpenBenchmarking.org link?

[rob11311]

That card is really a waste of money, it's so bad...I would buy a GTX 750Ti for 100 dollars instead.

This is a silly viewpoint, just because something does not fit your requirements does not mean it won't suit someone with differing requirements.
For instance, I have an old desktop PC with SSD which I am thinking of passing on with a fresh install of Windows 10 on it.
Buying a cheap quiet passively cooled card like this makes sense, the recipients would get a perfectly decent productivity, light gaming computer that'd seem faster than a new budget PC with HDD only.

[rob11311]

Seriously? Aren't OpenCL and CUDA all about the performance? What exactly is so enterprise quality with the lowest end GPU performing really bad in those benchmarks? It's actually so slow that it competes with high end x86 CPUs so your Xeon system might just work as well without such a lousy external GPU.

How much do those high end Xeon CPUs cost? What if you're developing an OpenCL/CUDA application, does every developer need a top of the range space heater GPU or massive server? What about some SOHO type need for occasional number crunching? etc etc etc

[JonathanM]

I recently added a low end AMD card to a 5 year old Intel system because Intel apparently does not care enough for old Intel integrated graphics to fix the lockups.
I hope that the open source AMD drivers will keep working for the next 5 years.
(Upgraded the system to Ubuntu 14.04 from 12.04. Searching for a fix I only found a bug report showing me that this issue has been there on every kernel released the last few years.)

[speculatrix]

Michael wrote "The GeForce GT 710 is certainly much faster than the GT 710"
I think he means "faster than the GT610"

[uid313]

The DDR3 memory limits the performance of this graphics card.
This graphics card is basically useless for anyone with any graphics card or with any integrated graphics.
This card is only useful for people without integrated graphics and without a graphics card, if they want a cheap graphics card.

It would be interesting to see this benchmarked against Haswell, Broadwell and Skylake.

[efikkan]

Seriously? Aren't OpenCL and CUDA all about the performance? What exactly is so enterprise quality with the lowest end GPU performing really bad in those benchmarks? It's actually so slow that it competes with high end x86 CPUs so your Xeon system might just work as well without such a lousy external GPU.

There are many cases where a small GPU providing good acceleration is good enough to speed up a workload. Enterprise quality is about the stability, driver quality etc. more than just performance.