OpenGL 4.0 FP64 GLSL Shaders Will Run in Software Mode on Radeon HD 5700

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UPDATE: Radeon HD 57xx Will Run OpenGL 4.0 FP64 Operations On GPU

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In this news we learnt that Radeons HD 5700 (HD 5770 and HD 5750) have no double precision floating point processing support.

One of the new features of OpenGL 4.0 is the support of double precision FP64 in GLSL shaders via the GL_ARB_gpu_shader_fp64 extension.

Since Radeons HD 5750/5770 don’t support double precision in hardware, the FP64 will be emulated in software mode, read on CPU! That means that when a GLSL shader with FP64 variables (like double x, dvec4 vNormal, etc.) is used, it will be executed on the CPU. Massive drop in performance for Radeons HD 5700…

[via]