It’s been a while since ATI has released a new FireGL workstation graphics card. However workstation graphics cards work on a different refresh cycle than your typical gaming graphics card. While gaming and mainstream graphics cards get refreshed every six months workstation graphics cards aren’t refreshed quite as often. This is because workstation class graphics cards have to endure vigorous testing and certification for various CAD/CAM applications such as 3D Studio Max, Pro Engineer Wildfire, Alias MAYA, etc… Drivers aren’t updated as often either as each driver release has to go through the same testing and certification—the drivers aren’t your typical monthly WHQL certified Catalyst driver releases.

Ever since ATI acquired the FireGL division from the former Diamond Multimedia new FireGL graphics cards are generally based on ATI’s gaming desktop offerings. Despite more vigorous driver/hardware testing and certification procedures the core architectures are generally very similar. There are however enough architectural tweaks and enhancements to warrant a separate graphics core. ATI’s latest FireGL workstation graphics card is based on their previous Radeon X1800 consumer graphics card. Positioned as an ultra high end workstation graphics card the new FireGL V7350 is set to take on NVIDIA’s Quadro FX4500 ultra high end offering, but does ATI’s latest and greatest have what it takes to do battle with NVIDIA? Enter ATI’s $2000 FireGL V7350 workstation graphics card—this time with 1GB of video memory.

The FireGL V7350 is based on ATI’s Radeon X1800 architecture which means a lot of the specifications are quite similar. Much like the X1800XT the FireGL V7350 is fabricated on a 90 nanometer process, has 8 vertex shaders, 16 pixel pipes, 128-bit floating point precision, Shader Model 3.0 support, 256-bit memory interface, 512-bit ring bus architecture, DirectX 9, OpenGL 2.0, and AVIVO. Additionally there’s also support for Stereo 3D glasses for those that work with molecular dynamic applications.

If the FireGL V7350 looks familiar it’s because the overall board layout and cooler are very similar to ATI’s Radeon X1800. The cooler is pretty much the same cooler with a different paint job. As with ATI’s desktop offering the FireGL V7350 can drive two ultra high resolution displays with its two dual-link DVI ports for those fortunate enough to have two 2560x1600 capable displays. While the traditional consumer Radeon X1800 would have integrated VIVO capabilities the professional FireGL V7350 only has support for component video output via an included dongle. 

Despite its various similarities with ATI’s consumer offerings this is where the similarities end. As the FireGL V7350 is a professional level graphics card it has a header for a framelock and/or genlock daughterboard. Those wanting to take advantage of framelock and genlock will have to wait though. ATI expects to have their advanced I/O daughter card for framelock and genlock support in the second half of 2006.

When modeling complex objects the models get a bit complicated and can take up excessive amounts of video memory for textures. This can slow down your overall modeling experience as moving things around, rotating the model; etc will start to slow down. ATI has equipped the FireGL V7350 with 1GB for such situations. Yes I said 1GB, the largest amount of video memory found on a graphics card and more memory than a typical mid-range computer system has. The GDDR3 memory is provided by Samsung K4J52324QC-BJ12 modules rated for 800 MHz (1.6 GHz) operation—similar to the desktop models.

Power consumption, Conclusion

Power consumption

Power consumption between the FireGL V7350 and Radeon X1800XT are pretty similar—although the V7350 uses a little more power, most likely to the increased amount of memory. At idle the V7350 uses 20 watts more than the FX1400 due to its greater complexity. When a load is placed on the GPU the power consumption difference jumps to 45 watts, though still similar to the desktop Radeon X1800XT.

Conclusion

It’s really hard to come to a conclusion with the FireGL V7350. While it’s faster than NVIDIA’s midrange Quadro FX1400 in nearly all of the benchmarks, it falls behind in a couple. Considering the price differences between the cards, $2000 vs. $600 the improvements are well worth the pricing differences. We also have to take into consideration that the FireGL V7350 is ATI’s ultra high end graphics card and the Quadro FX1400 is NVIDIA’s midrange workstation offering. ATI clearly has an advantage when it comes to UGS NX but this is only compared to NVIDIA’s midrange offering.  This isn’t to say the FireGL V7350 isn’t a capable workstation graphics card, from a performance perspective it is a fast card for 3D work. While we didn’t have a competing ultra high end card from NVIDIA to compare it against we expect the performance to be very close with ATI, though ATI would have a greater advantage when dealing with larger data sets that can take advantage of the extra memory.

With its AVIVO implementation the FireGL V7350 coupled with the Advanced I/O daughterboard can also output superb images on a large wall of displays but since we can’t really test this we can only speculate and theorize.

In day to day usage the FireGL V7350 is a great card that performs well and is well suited for any workstation. However with a $2000 price tag it’s a bit hard to swallow for home usage, but in a work environment the card is priced fairly. Nonetheless if your application of choice requires a large amount of texture memory than the FireGL V7350 is the only way to go as it’s the only card on the market with 1GB of video memory.

 

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• Test Setup (1 of 4)
• SPECviewperf 8.1 (2 of 4)
• SPECapc Pro E, Cinebench 2003 (3 of 4)
• Power consumption, Conclusion (4 of 4)