ATI has just released a new driver for their popular FirePro cards that boasts an impressive performance boost in most CAD and graphics applications (see chart above). Even Ensight (a popular scientific visualization package) and Maya (popular modeling/animation package) see slight boosts (5%), making it a no-brainer of an upgrade. Other new features include:
* Blue-line stereo 3D – In addition to current support of numerous active, passive and autostereoscopic displays, the new driver provides blue-line stereo support for synchronizing 3D glasses. This new mode enables stereo on any ATI FirePro graphics accelerator, without the need for the stereo synchronization connector currently available on select accelerators.
* 10-bit color for PhotoShop – Photoshop users now have the ability to render images with 10-bit per component color, ensuring an exact representation of colors between Photoshop CS4 and their 10-bit display, as well as the ability to maintain an end-to-end 10-bit color workflow in real-time.
* DisplayPort audio – Support for 5.1 Dolby Digital and 5.1 DTS surround sound as well as 8-channel and 2-channel uncompressed audio over the display port connector
Hopefully the performance boost doesn’t come at the cost of other very important functionality.
