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ATI FirePro plays leapfrog with Nvidia

AMD has made its latest move in the game of workstation-class graphics leapfrog it's playing with competitor Nvidia. On Tuesday, the company announced its ATI FirePro V8750 3D workstation graphics accelerator, designed - as explained by AMD - for "CAD, Digital Content Creation (DCC) and oil and gas professionals." In other words …

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Insane Reindeer
Pint

Today's To Do:

Figure out what exactly you can do to a graphics card to make it cost around £7000! And figure out why you would want a card like this...

Jonathan 17

GPU Comparison

quote:"Nvidia's Quadro FX 5800, on the other hand, has 240 processing cores and 102GB per second bandwidth to its 4GB GDDR3 memory. That's still slower than the specs of the FirePro V8750, but its 4GB memory allotment is significantly higher than the 2GB of the V8750 and the 1.5GB of the FX 4800."

You do realize that in most cases the FX5800 will be faster because its shader processors run at a much higher clock speed? both of those chips use very different architectures, so you cant directly compare shader processor to shader processor. Only benchmarks can tell the story.

No mention of CUDA or OpenCL? I'm disappointed, what good is an accelerator without an API?

@Insane Reindeer

Not much difference really, maybe except the chips used are specially selected and the boards are probably more fault tolerant. There used to be firmware hacks that you could do to flash a GeForce into a Quadro, so essentially the silicon is the same but the price is much higher. Some additional features get enabled, such as higher precision functions I think.

But yeah, Quadro's and FirePro's just generally have higher profit margins.

Paul 77
Linux

Drivers

Hopefully for that price they have removed their fingers from their bottoms and supplied Linux OpenGL drivers that actually work...

Peter Kay

Historically ATI have been quite good here

What you're paying for is the certified drivers and custom add ins for high end packages. They do make a difference.

However, from what I can see the difference is largely with OpenGL applications. OpenGL is cross platform and has some useful features, but some of the higher end apps have been moving to DirectX. I'm not sure in that case the cards are quite as useful..

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward

@Today's To Do

.... simple - its the best way to win the "I spent more money on my graphics card than you" argument.

Ross Beavis
Megaphone

Re: Today's To Do

Did you not read the article?

"...for CAD, Digital Content Creation (DCC) and oil and gas professionals... for corporate installations that require high-end graphic performance."

and

"The V8750 is for pro users who need hyper-accurate 16-bit RGB color and 2560-by-1600 multiple-display resolutions."

Believe it or not, there are some people who do need this kind of performance.

Andy Bright
Thumb Up

Re: Today's To Do

Try modeling a 30 mile, six lane road, with relevant bridges, soil types, hydrology, etc overlaid with survey data using a $100 video card on a $400 Dell and you'll see why these things aren't quite up to the job.

The software I use can not only keep track of my design to automatically correct everything if I modify a part of the road outside of National Civil Engineering standards, but can then be transferred to the equipment in the field so it can do its work automatically and conform to my design to 1/100 of a millimeter accuracy.

When we integrate satellite imagery over our designs to verify simple things like the bridge is in the right bloody place, the same software will correct perception errors making the satellite image more accurate.

We also use the same 3D CAD software for project management. For example a bridge required new supports, a new bridge would have been better but we didn't have the funding. Using the software to figure out alternative options that fit within our budget, what we did was create the supports next to the old bridge and then transfer the "road" to the new supports. We then joined the new bridge to the existing road on either side and removed the old supports.

The software created an animated version detailing the process together with the required paperwork and a machine copy for the equipment that would be automating the work. The cool factor came when the video recording (actually sped-up time lapsed photography) of the real work looked identical to that 3D animation we'd created for the field engineers.

Can we do these things using a gaming card? Yes and it will still have the same accuracy, but because it isn't accelerating the right kind of graphics it's like using an onboard chipset to run Crysis with all the knobs turned to max. Are these cards worth their price? Probably not, they probably aren't any more complicated than the cards that can push 60 FPS plus in Crysis, but because they're seen as tools for professionals in an industry that builds billion dollar projects over decades, $5000 isn't exactly a bank breaking amount.

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