12.4 Proxies for CPU and GPU performance

When choosing hardware for running engineering software, it is important to consider performance for price, including an allowance for the cost of the software licencing. With licencing costs included, this often favours choosing recent high performance hardware. Prices for hardware can be well known in advance, but knowing what performance will be achieved on particular hardware, for a specific software, can be difficult.

TUFLOW publishes computational performance results for a benchmark 2D hydraulic model - refer to the links in Section 12. For other hardware that is not listed on these pages, the TUFLOW development team has found that some published 3rd party hardware benchmarks offer a relative performance comparison that appears to be consistent with our own performance measurements. These may be found at:

https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/

At this site there is a “High End Video Card Chart”. The scores for each GPU are calculated from a number of different tests, mostly to do with graphics performance. There is also a “GPU Compute Video Card Chart”, but interestingly we have found the former chart to be a better proxy for how well a GPU will run a TUFLOW HPC model. This site also has excellent CPU charts for multi-core and single-core performance.