Only a couple of years ago graphics giant ATI said it wasn’t interested in the ultra high-end professional graphics market. However, a lot can change in two years and this month the Canadian company unveiled a new professional graphics card, which with 1GB of on-board GDDR3 memory can be described as nothing other than ultra high end.

The FireGL V7350 is the first FireGL card built with ATI’s new 90 nanometer semiconductor fabrication technology, and gives us a glimpse of the company’s second wave of professional PCI Express graphics cards. At the same time ATI also announced the FireGL V7300, which features exactly the same core technology, but only, and I say only with a pinch of salt, 512MB of GDDR 3 memory. Indeed, 512MB is still a serious amount of memory to put on a graphics board, and as a result the FireGL V7300 will more than likely satisfy the requirements of the majority of visualisation specialists and certainly CAD users. So where does this leave the 1GB card? In addition to all the headlines the FireGL V7350 is likely to grab the attention of the medical and oil and gas industries where excessively large datasets are commonplace. But this doesn’t mean to say that it will not find a footing in the design arena. The move to 64-bit CAD and even more complex models is also likely to drive the adoption of this beast of a card. But in addition to huge amounts of memory, what other technologies do the new FireGL cards bring to the table?

The technology

As you’d expect, both cards support OpenGL and DirectX graphics libraries. With CAD vendors such as Autodesk continuing the transition to DirectX, this will become much more important to professional users than just being able to play the latest 3D games, for which it is often required. The technical specifications of the new cards highlight eight geometry engines, sixteen pixel shader processors, a 512-bit ring bus memory controller, and Shader model 3.0 support, which will be of particular interest to visualisation specialists.

Both cards have also been released under the Avivo logo, the umbrella brand for ATI’s video and display expertise. While most CAD users won’t be interested in the technologies behind Avivo, CGI professionals are likely to sit up and take notice. The new cards can be used to re-encode video very quickly, by taking the computational load off the CPU and onto the GPU, and image quality has also been addressed with the option of 10-bit processing for more realistic colour definition - though this is more of a technology for tomorrow as most monitors do not support this yet.

On the subject of monitors, with two dual link outputs, both cards are able to drive two nine megapixel (3,840 x 2,400) displays or four 2,560 x 1,600 displays, like the impressive Apple Cinema.

Results and conclusions

We tested the flagship FireGL V7350 inside an Armari Gravistar SR workstation (more on this next month) featuring the latest dual core processor from AMD, the 2.6GHz Opteron 185. If our results confirmed one thing, it’s that there’s little point in investing in one of these cards if you use Autodesk Inventor, as you won’t get any more performance than you would out of a £200 Quadro FX 540 from Nvidia. It will, however, be interesting to see if this changes with the imminent arrival of Inventor 11. This new release will be able to use DirectX instead of OpenGL, and we expect it to significantly boost 3D performance in Autodesk’s flagship MCAD application, which is currently bottlenecked by the speed of the CPU.

As you’d expect from a card of this positioning the FireGL V7350 showed its true potential under 3ds Max, Autodesk’s key visualisation and animation application, where the results were the highest we’ve seen in the MCAD labs. At this moment it’s also worth commenting on the performance under Windows XP x64 Edition, where there was around a 5% drop from 32-bit Windows XP. This, according to ATI, is due to the CPU overhead imposed by Microsoft’s 64-bit Operating System.

However, the real worth of the new cards go beyond benchmark figures. 2006 is set to be the year when many CAD applications and users make the move to Windows XP x64 Edition. With model size and complexity driving this change, we’re expecting a quantum shift in the loads that will be put on graphics cards. Kitted out with 512MB and 1GB respectively the FireGL V7300 and FireGL V7350 look perfectively positioned to support this next generation of ultra-high-end users, and with 3Dlabs just announcing its departure from the professional workstation graphics sector, ATI can now take the battle to one front, where it will start to fight Nvidia at all levels of the workstation market.