#GRAPHIC CARD BENCHMARK AMD FIREPRO DRIVERS#
#GRAPHIC CARD BENCHMARK AMD FIREPRO DRIVER#
#GRAPHIC CARD BENCHMARK AMD FIREPRO PRO#
#GRAPHIC CARD BENCHMARK AMD FIREPRO SOFTWARE#

The ATI FirePro V3800 is AMD’s entry point into its professional product line-up, and replaces 2008’s V3750. The five new cards we will be looking at here are the entry-level ATI FirePro V3800 and V4800, the mid-range V5800, and the high-end V7800 and V8800. This April, AMD refreshed its ATI FirePro lineup with its newest series of GPUs, supporting all the newest 3D and GPGPU APIs: DirectX 11, OpenGL 4 and OpenCL 1.

#GRAPHIC CARD BENCHMARK AMD FIREPRO DRIVERS#

In addition, AMD has recently released custom display drivers for Autodesk’s AutoCAD and 3ds Max 20 – something I will discuss further in the benchmarking section of this article.

#GRAPHIC CARD BENCHMARK AMD FIREPRO PRO#

When I polled other users, the general consensus was that while these applications will work on consumer graphics accelerators, performance with those non-professional cards is sub-par, and viewport glitches and anomalies are quite common: issues that simply do not exist with pro cards. These not only increase performance, but also offer excellent stability and predictability when compared to their desktop counterparts, particularly when running CAD packages.

#GRAPHIC CARD BENCHMARK AMD FIREPRO DRIVER#

The driver set for the ATI FirePro cards includes extensive optimizations for popular DCC and CAD applications, including 3ds Max, Maya, Softimage, AutoCAD and SolidWorks. In addition, the manufacturers offer much more extensive customer support for their professional products than the equivalent consumer cards. Pro cards are also extensively optimized, tested and certified for use with CAD and DCC applications. While consumer hardware is tuned more towards fill rate and shader calculations, pro cards are tuned for 3D operations such as geometry transformations and vertex matrices, as well as better performance under GPGPU APIs such as OpenCL and DirectCompute.

#GRAPHIC CARD BENCHMARK AMD FIREPRO SOFTWARE#

However, the biggest difference between professional and consumer cards is their driver set and software support. Also, they carry a lot more RAM than their consumer counterparts – which is actually very important, as I will discuss later on in this article. These days, most pro cards share hardware with their consumer counterparts, although the chips are usually hand-picked from the highest-quality parts of a production run. From a hardware standpoint, the answer is “not much” – certainly not as much as in the late 1990s and early 2000s when 3Dlabs and ELSA were building hardware specifically aimed at professional users.

I’m often asked what the difference between desktop graphics accelerators and their professional counterparts is. It is targeted at graphics professionals who rely not only on speed, but rock-solid stability and support. The ATI FirePro series is part of AMD’s professional line, aimed at the high-end CAD and DCC markets.

While there used to be several players in the latter category, including 3Dlabs, Matrox and ELSA, the industry is now dominated by two companies: AMD (following its acquisition of ATI) and Nvidia. The world of 3D GPUs has, since its inception, consisted of two main categories: the consumer cards (also known as the desktop sector, or gaming cards) and the professional products. Today, we are here to look at AMD’s current lineup of professional 3D graphics accelerators, the ATI Fire Pro series. Some would even argue that it is a more powerful platform for 3D calculations than the CPU itself – but that’s a debate for another time. It has a central logic processor, its own memory banks and various I/O controllers, making it more like a miniature computer within a computer. The video card or Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) is one of the most complex pieces of hardware in modern PCs.

Graphic card benchmark amd firepro