ATI - 6.10.13 - GFLOPS - How accurate?

I installed 6.10.13 on my one system with an ATI card (yes, I know SETI does not have an ap for ATI cards....yet) but I was surprised by the GFLOPS the card pulled. BOINC says the card (ATI Radeon HD 2600 1GB) is 174 GFLOPS, is that accurate?! My OC'ed 9600GT is only 41 GFLOPS, that is a huge difference. Just curious, thanks!
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I was using my 2600XT 1GB on Collatz until it blew up a few weeks ago. It could run a Collatz WU in about 2 hours. My 4770 can do the same work in about 12 minutes using their optimized app 2.05b . its free credits so I wouldn't knock how slow that card is. Though I would upgrade the HSF if you intend on work collatz or Milkyway on it.
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Agreed the Collatz project used optimized apps for both the ATI and CUda cards. Crunch3r has done a great job on them. It apprears that he's put a lot of effort in maximizing the ATI cards though. My 4770 runs Collatz much faster than a Cuda 260 and 275. I imagine that they are working on a better app as we speak for the Cuda cards
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Funny, I asked Andreas (Gipsel/Cluster P.) about that the other day. His answer to me:

"The numbers for nvidia cards base on some kind of characterization or if you want benchmarking with the SETI application if I remember right.

The ATI numbers are the theoretical single precision peak performance. And yes, in that sense they are correct. So it is basically the same as saying one CPU core running at 3GHz is capable of 6 GFlops in single precision (using the x87 FPU and for a more recent CPUs, a Pentium3 is only capable of 1 flop per cycle) or 24 GFlops using SSE (only Phenom/AthlonII and Core2/Core i7, for older ones it is 12 GFlops).

To sum it up, the nvidia and ATI numbers are not comparable right now. I guess the CUDA runtime is also giving some information about the number of cores in the GPU. So it should be easy to get more comparable numbers to ATI. The peak SP performance is simply: cores * 2 * clock frequency

One could include the apocryphal "missing MUL" of the nvidia cards by using cores * 3 * frequency (and for the GTX2xx line it has some credibility, but prior GPUs didn't have the capability, even when nvidias marketing claimed otherwise), but the next generation will be officially back to 2 flops per core and cycle. In ATIs case one has to deduce the number of units in the GPU from the number of SIMD blocks and the size of those, maybe one has to do something similar for nvidia cards too. In the end, one should arrive for instance for a GTX285 running stock clocks at:

240 cores * 3 flops * 1,476 GHz = 1,063 GFlops

If one wants to include also double precision numbers, these are 1/5 of the SP peak in case of ATI and for nvidia 1/12 of the SP throughput (will be more with the next generation).

So a HD5870 has 2720 GFlops in single precision and 544 GFlops in double precision. The Milkyway app is actually capable of really using about 400 DP GFlops of it, so it is a real figure and not just made up by the marketing department. Such a card is a real monster for those puny WUs ;). A GTX285 has the already mentioned 1063 GFlops in SP and a measly 88.6 GFlops with DP (and can use roughly 50GFlops of it in Milkyway after an nvidia engineer helped the project a bit)."
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Jord

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- BOINC User Wiki

Real is just a matter of perception.

yes surprising information to say the least.
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More info on the ati 5870 internals that may matter to those that understand the technical details of everything and what may limit what or allow for what. (src: beyond3d)

best non-gaming review I've found so far anyhow - tho they do cover that slightly - I'm not in the "understand the intricate tech details" category tho it was useful to learn what marketing specs vs actual specs are, once sliced and diced.

Cool, I was wondering why only NVIDIA cards were showing up on computer stats, felt left out with my dual ATI HD4870 X 2. It's great to see that it's being worked on. Will be nice having more cores working for the cause...going to give the 6.10.13 build a try. I wonder if it's going to see all 4 GPUs since the cards are running in quad crossfire mode... Collatz looks very promising, going to give that whirl too.