AMD FirePro Development User Community: Share tips and best practices

AMD launched a FirePro Development user community for end-users, developers and AMD experts to share tips and best practices about the FirePro Vx800 and Vx900 graphic cards. The newly updated community page greatly improves users’ ability to ask questions and get answers on any FirePro related topic:

For example, here’s an interesting post just answered:

Question
I’m trying to solve a very specific problem. For this, I need to run 4 displays at 120Hz, and have the vsync for each trigger a quarter of a frame after the previous:
Display 0, start frames at 0s, 4/480s, 8/480s, ...
Display 1, start frames at 1/480s, 5/480s, 9/480s, ...
Display 2, start frames at 2/480s, 6/480s, 10/480s, ...
Display 3, start frames at 3/480s, 7/480s, 11/480s, ...

Now the question is, can I do this with one S400 and one or more graphic cards?

Answer
1: Yes, you can connect up to 4 GPUs to a single S400 board.
2: You can genlock multiple displays that are connected to a single GPU as long as the connected monitors are identical.
3: The accepted input range for the house sync is between 15 and 120 H

Remote Graphics and the Professional CAD Workstation, Part 4: Sustainability

The final post in the 4-part series on remote graphics for CAD talks about sustainability, RemoteFX and lastly gives a summary of when PCoIP remote graphics is the right solution.

"The real question is not if you should replace all of your high end workstations, but rather to examine when and where it makes economic and performance sense. For the true CAD power user, remote graphics is not there yet in terms of matching performance with a dedicated local workstation with a top-of-the-line FirePro or Quadro-based graphics card. But for users working on 2D drawings or moderate complexity 3D models:

1. If you are a large company about to install new workstations or replace end-of-life existing workstations, you should carefully look at a remote graphics solution like the FirePro RG220, as a way to significantly reduce costs and improve the ambient work environment.
2. If you have real IP security issues where you need to tightly control what CAD information leaves the office, then PCoIP hardware on the remote graphics card and on the zero client translates to heightened security for all users. For the user who works with moderately complex CAD, a 1:1 remote graphics setup will not save costs, but it will increase security.

Read the full series on Remote Graphics:

• Part 1: Overview and potential benefits
• Part 2: Reduced costs
• Part 3: Security advantages
• Part 4: Remote Graphics = Greener and More Sustainable, What about RemoteFX?, Wrap up

CADSpeed: Remote Graphics and the Professional CAD Workstation, Part 3: Security for Serious 3D CAD

Post #3 in the 4-part series on remote graphics for CAD, talks about remote graphics solutions that include hardware accelerated encryption and high-speed transmission PCoIP technologies like the FirePro RG220 Remote Graphics card.

For high performance CAD this is a 1:1 solutions (one thin client mapped to one remote graphics card).  The big gain for companies where intellectual property is critical, is security.  With remote graphics and PCoIP, the data resides on the server and graphics card and never is at risk for theft (inadvertent or intentional) from the local machine. For engineering companies who do projects for government or large defense manufacturers, remote graphics give high performance, but eliminates many security issues.

The post also talks about remote management and gives and example from an Oil & Gas company using the soluiton

CADSpeed blog: Remote Graphics and the Professional CAD Workstation, Part 2: Reduced Hardware Costs

Post #2 in the 4-part series on remote graphics for CAD, talks about how any firm with users working on 2D AutoCAD DWG drawings or medium-complexity 3D projects will be able to support four users on thin clients with a single FirePro RG220 Remote Graphics card (offers hardware-accelerated PCoIP compression) and at least one quad-core CPU server running the Parallels Workstation Extreme 4.0 hypervisor.

By implementing a remote graphics solution that is capable of supporting more than one user on zero clients, that’s fewer workstations and graphic cards a company has to buy and support.

4-part CADSpeed blog series on Remote Graphics for professional CAD

I’ve started another blog series for Cadalyst magazine focused on Remote Graphics for professional CAD users.  I did a bunch of research to find out what was real vs what was marketing.  The first in the series is up here.  The remaining three parts describe in detail where remote graphics works and where it doesn’t.

What is Remote Graphics for CAD? It is the ability to have a full CAD computing experience — with display, keyboard and mouse — but the actual 2D/3D computing is done on a device that sits in the data center. If you just sat down and started doing some basic CAD work on one of these systems, you wouldn’t even realize the workstation was missing from your desk until you went to power off the system, charge your phone or save files to a USB thumb drive.