AMD is looking to recapture a bit of CAD glory via a new collection of AutoCAD and 3dsMax plugins that look strangely familiar to the old NVidia MAXTreme drivers for the same packages. Using the plugins and a compatible ATI FirePro or FireGL card, you can see some pretty significant performance boosts, as shown above.
ATI’s FirePro application support team have devised a way to drastically increase the performance of FirePro or FireGL workstation graphics cards when running AutoCAD or 3ds Max. AMD has just released a set of performance plug-ins designed to provide additional optimizations for AutoCAD 2010, AutoCAD 2011, 3ds Max 2010, and 3ds Max 2011. With these plug-ins, ATI claims their “FirePro graphics cards offer more than double the performance over comparable consumer graphics cards.” AMD claims users can expect significant improvements in visual quality as well.
It looks like they’re trying to fight back to regain some of the market they’ve lost to Quadro in the high-end workstation space. AMD’s (it still seems unnatural to call them AMD instead of ATI, but I digress) FirePro cards are nice cards, but the custom GL support in Quadro has really crushed them in the workstation benchmarks. Hopefully these new plugins will close the gap.
via ATI FirePro Peformance Plug-ins Optimized for AutoCAD, 3ds Max – HotHardware, and FireUser and their followup
