VizWorld.com

The brains at FireUser.com are running a contest to win a brand new AMD FirePro V5900, and all you have to do is post a comment on their site or tweet about your experience with any of the recent FirePro cards.

We believe the new line of FirePro cards and drivers are more stable and more reliable than any other graphics solution out there. But we want to hear unbiased reality from end users – from the single designer using PhotoShop CS5 to the multi-person CAD shop using a range of DCC and CAD/CAE apps.

Hit their sites for the full rules, but it’s an interesting way to reward the community for honestly reporting their experiences (Good or Bad) with the FirePro cards.  Hopefully someone will catalog all of the results, it could be a good basis for known issues and resolutions with the gear, as well as a great collection of user success stories.

via Experience FirePro! Sweepstakes – Qualify to Win a FirePro V5900 | FireUser Blog.

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AMD has just announced their new entry-level FirePro card, a modified version of the Radeon HD 6670 that retails for a mere $189.  It comes with the same driver support as the bigger FirePro’s at a mere fraction of the price.

Since AMD’s Firepro V4900 has a pretty standard AMD Turks GPU, there is support for the firm’s multi-display Eyefinity technology plus two Displayport 1.2 and a single DVI dual-link outputs, supporting up to six displays.

via Amd releases its entry-level firepro v4900 graphics card- The Inquirer.

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Here’s a humorous new marketing video from AMD pushing their AMD FirePro cards.  They tackle the “unnamed Green-colored Vendor” as being overpriced, power-hungry, and less effective (4 monitors on 2 cards, vs 6 monitors on 1).  It’s funny if not entirely accurate, but it’s marketing fluff, so who cares if it’s 100% accurate right? 90% is good enough.

I do have to wonder why NVidia sells Quadro’s for $5k.

Update 6/2 10am: Looks like AMD pulled it down, or at least marked it “Private”.  No indication on why…

YouTube – AMD FirePro: Good Idea, Bad Idea.

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AMD has announced a new hardware-level feature in their new FirePro V5900 and V7900 cards called “GeometryBoost”.  What is this you ask?

GeometryBoost in the new FirePro V5900 and FirePro V7900 is a unique hardware capability that processes two primitives per clock cycle.  Each graphics engine is assigned to its own shader engine, consisting of up to 10 SIMDs.  The results is a doubling in the rate of primitive & vertex processing, as well as back/front culling rates and scan conversion setup.  It also doubles early reject rates.

The new 8th generation tessellation engine improves performance up to 3X in both OpenGL 4.1 and DirectX 11.

Sounds like another feature designed to compete with Quadro and targeted at the high-end CAD space.  The last comment mentions using their new tessellation ending with OpenGL4.1 and DX11, but hopefully the “GeometryBoost” features will also offer a nice performance boost to earlier versions.

via What is AMD GeometryBoost? | FireUser Blog.

Hardware amd, firepro

A new press release from AMD announces their new AMD FireStream 9350 and 9370 GPU compute accelerators, apparently feeling the hurt from the new NVidia Fermi offerings as the entire press release focuses on the 2x improvement in Single and Double Precision performance.

“Our customers’ face increasingly demanding enterprise data center requirements for power consumption, cooling, and floor space, and at Supermicro our goal is to deliver solutions that offer maximum performance per watt, per square foot and per dollar,” said Don Clegg, vice president of Marketing at Supermicro. “By offering GPU compute accelerators in combination with powerful multi-core CPUs, we are keeping pace with our customers’ demands. The AMD FireStream 9350 and 9370 compute accelerators are a natural fit for our industry-leading server solutions.”

They claim that the new 9370 offers 2.64 TeraFlops of single precision performance, and 528 GigaFlops of double-precision performance, all with 4GB of GDDR5 memory and 225Watts of power.  That puts a 5x boost on single-precision over double-precision, not too shabby.  These numbers still beat the max figures of the NVidia cards, but the big question is “What possibly can achieve that maximum throughput in a useful way?” The short answer is: nothing.

It definitely looks like a great card from ATI, but I’m sure in practical benchmarks between it and the new Fermi-driven NVidia offerings, the NVidia will probably still edge it out due to CUDA support and better scheduling and kernel optimizations.

Press Release.

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AMD has just announced the obvious step of refreshing the entire FirePro line of graphics cards with their newest Evergreen-based chip, that brings DX11, OpenGL3.2 & 4, and Eyefinity support to the entire line.  Tony DeYoung of FireUser.com has a great chart detailing the new cards.

Obvious standouts to me: Faster memory, more memory (think VBO performance), huge increases in number of stream processors (a.k.a shader units), and Eyefinity support on all but the V3800. What I would like to also know is energy consumption in idle mode as well as some noise comparison to previous models. I know the V8800 was significantly better in both regards to its predecessor.

Sadly, it looks like none of them support the full 6-screen Eyefinity configuration, and only the highest-end (V8800) supports 4 displays.  None of them support 3 displays.

Update 2:15pm: I was just contacted by AMD to state that all of the cards, except the lowest-end V3800k, support 3 displays.  I’m currently uncertain of how (if it’s even true), as all of them (except the V8800) only have 2 Displayport connectors.  Unless you can connect the DVI & both displayports at the same time (which seems unlikely to me)….

via The wait is over!  AMD updates entire FirePro line to Evergreen GPUs – DX11, Eyefinity, OpenGL, CAD | FireUser Blog.

Hardware amd, ati, eyefinity, firepro

While NVidia has Quadro, AMD has FirePro, a similar line of high-performance cards targeted at graphics designers and visual effects artists.  Yesterday they announced the new line of FirePro cards, the ATI FirePro V8800, which supports DirectX11 and Eyefinity multi-display technology.  That’s not all tho, as the new card offers 2.6 teraflops of compute power and an impressive 147.2GB/s of memory bandwidth, beating out the QuadroFX5800′s 104GB/s.  The card can drive 4 independent 30″ displays (via Displayport), and works with the S400 Synchronization Module.

“Autodesk recognizes the importance of having our customers invest in a professional graphics solution,” said Jim White, director of Global Alliances, Autodesk. “Together with AMD, a leader in the professional graphics space, we’re able to provide Autodesk users with visually accurate, high performance creative tools. We look forward to working with AMD and the next generation of ATI FirePro graphics to enable our customers with exceptional productivity.”

Has an MSRP of $1499 USD, although I don’t see it available on NewEgg or Tigerdirect yet.

via AMD Extends Leadership To Professional Graphics.

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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.

via ATI FirePro driver v8.702 boosts CAD application performance up to 20% – adds blue-line stereo 3D | FireUser Blog.

Hardware amd, ati, driver, firepro

AMD puts a new line in the sand with a 2GB video card, the V8750.  For specs, it’s got 2GB of GDDR5 memory but runs at the same speed as the V8700.  It beats the competition performance-wise by a small margin, so it’s hard to justify the price unless you’re in severe need of the 2GB of ram.  Say, like you’re a user of the new MachStudio Pro acceleration:

“We’re amazed at the performance boost to our already fast MachStudio Pro real-time 3D workflow and rendering product with the new ATI FirePro V8750 3D workstation graphics accelerator,” said David Koenig, CEO, StudioGPU. “Powered by the new ATI FirePro workstation graphics accelerator, the MachStudio Pro non-linear real-time 3D finishing workflow enables design firms and 3D artists everywhere to power through big, complex projects amazingly fast. Thanks to the ATI graphic accelerators, small and mid-size studios can now work at the speed of thought to streamline workflow in a way that was impossible for the largest and most fully equipped production facilities as little as a year ago.”

HotHardware has benchmarks.

via AMD Delivers Its Most Powerful Professional 3D Graphics Card With Up To Four Times The Processing Power And More Memory Bandwidth Than Comparable Competing Solution(1).

Hardware amd, benchmark, firepro

The AMD FirePro team is putting out a call to CG designers and animators to enter the OOMPH Design Challenge. The challenge is to create an animated and/or static render depicting a sumo wrestler.

Entries must be submitted by July 29, 2009. The top 5 judges’ picks in each category will be showcased in the OOMPH Lounge at Booth #2417 at Siggraph 2009. Winners receive a FirePro 3D workstation graphics accelerator.

For full contest details, hit up http://www.getmoreoomph.com/ .

Graphics amd, contest, firepro, siggraph