GTX Titan video cards

[shrapnel]

No point wasting money on Expensive GPUs unless you are a Hardcore Gamer. Chess Engines are still too Backward and unable to use the Power of GPUs.

[Dann Corbit]

No point wasting money on Expensive GPUs unless you are a Hardcore Gamer. Chess Engines are still too Backward and unable to use the Power of GPUs.

I am waiting for the day when the super high speed video ram is available to CPU and GPU transparently. When that happens, we will see a miracle in chess.

[Dann Corbit]

Does using GTX Titan video cards process any chess instructions that could be useful in chess? I may use 2x GTX 1080 watercooled cards or just a single card, it depends on what advice I get tonight! NewEgg has a GTX 1080 card in stock today and need to jump on it before they are gone. So a Titan vs GTX 1080 will Cuda cores benifit a 2x Xeon workstation? Thanks Daniel

I found some information on that topic a few years ago.

"This (can we use CUDA, PS3, etc.) is rapidly becoming a FAQ. To sum it up: Probably not, since
1. Floating-point performance is not very relevant for a chess engine, which works a lot more on bit-fiddling, branches and random memory access.
2. The type of parallelism that is the heart of the massive performance you can get from such solutions is less useful for a chess engine, where there are many interdependencies between the calculations."

Yace used floating point until he decided it was not deterministic. No reason chess engines cannot use floating point for eval. In fact, it's about time.

[Leo]

Does using GTX Titan video cards process any chess instructions that could be useful in chess? I may use 2x GTX 1080 watercooled cards or just a single card, it depends on what advice I get tonight! NewEgg has a GTX 1080 card in stock today and need to jump on it before they are gone. So a Titan vs GTX 1080 will Cuda cores benifit a 2x Xeon workstation? Thanks Daniel

I found some information on that topic a few years ago.

"This (can we use CUDA, PS3, etc.) is rapidly becoming a FAQ. To sum it up: Probably not, since
1. Floating-point performance is not very relevant for a chess engine, which works a lot more on bit-fiddling, branches and random memory access.
2. The type of parallelism that is the heart of the massive performance you can get from such solutions is less useful for a chess engine, where there are many interdependencies between the calculations."

Yace used floating point until he decided it was not deterministic. No reason chess engines cannot use floating point for eval. In fact, it's about time.

Can you get the ball rolling or recruit someone to do it?

[Werewolf]

I am waiting for the day when the super high speed video ram is available to CPU and GPU transparently. When that happens, we will see a miracle in chess.

With integrated graphics on the CPU, don't we already have that? (I know integrated graphics aren't great)

[Dann Corbit]

I am waiting for the day when the super high speed video ram is available to CPU and GPU transparently. When that happens, we will see a miracle in chess.

With integrated graphics on the CPU, don't we already have that? (I know integrated graphics aren't great)

There are some inferior CPU + GPU solutions that have transparent access to memory. The problem is that the really high powered cards (such as GeForce GTX 1080 Ti and AMD RX Vega 64 do 12 TFLOPS and 13 TFLOPS respectively) only see their own video RAM and the CPU can only see the standard RAM. In contrast, the fastest EPYC AMD CPU is about 1.2 TFLOPS but smoothly handles recursion and branching.

You have to copy data to and from the graphics card. The copy time to and from usually means it takes a really big job before you break even.

Some things, like move generation, are smoking fast on a GPU. See, for instance:
https://github.com/ankan-ban/perft_gpu

If the CPU could directly examine the results at memory speed, you could get enormous performance boosts.

The chips that have CPU and GPU on the same die are really wimpy by comparison.

[duncan]

No point wasting money on Expensive GPUs unless you are a Hardcore Gamer. Chess Engines are still too Backward and unable to use the Power of GPUs.

I am waiting for the day when the super high speed video ram is available to CPU and GPU transparently. When that happens, we will see a miracle in chess.

the miracle will be a speedup of how much ?