This video of Jon Clark, Sr. Applications Engineer with AMD, gives a high-level overview of AMD FirePro Eyefinity Technology. It starts by highlighting the FirePro V3900, V4900, V5900, and V7900. At about 1:15 sec in there is a great demo of a single V7900 using Eyefinity to drive three 24” displays running PTC’s Windchill, Pro/Engineer, and Creo.
Coming up this spring as part of American Airlines in-flight entertainment programming: an interview with Allen Bourgoyne, director of AMD’s FirePro Professional Graphics.
Tom’s Hardware has a particularly interesting review of AMD’s new entry level ($110) discrete, professional GPU - the AMD FirePro V3900. Tom’s ran a suite of benchmarks and the FirePro V3900 completely dominated Nvidia’s Quadro 400 and beat out the Quadro 600 in most scenario, often by a great margin - particularly in CATIA, Lightwave, Maya, and SolidWorks, and Siemens NX
Notably, the V3900 draws more power in idle and under load than its competitors, but Tom’s still recommend the FirePro V3900.
“The FirePro V3900 is a fitting successor for the V3800. Priced at $110, we consider it to be a good value in the entry-level workstation graphics card space. As long as you’re primarily looking at mostly static CAD images, this card is a good alternative to the low-end Quadro cards, both with respect to price and performance.”
Tom’s also did a quick comparison to comparable chips on consumer cards like the Radeon HD 6570 or Geforce GT 430 and saw massive performance dips due to consumer grade drivers. Conclusion: “For folks whose jobs depend on good performance and validation in money-making applications, paying the extra money (for the professional card and driver) is probably justified.”
These two PDFs discuss the value proposition and benchmarks of using FirePro graphics which have been optimized and certified for SolidWorks 2011 and SolidWorks 2012.
The SolidWorks-FirePro features overview discusses:
Real-time Previews with RealView
SolidWorks 2012 offers more advanced shading in real-time with RealView and Ambient Occlusion, for depth and realism reducing the need for ray-traced rendering.
Geometry Boost
SolidWorks 2012 offers more advanced shading in real-time with RealView and Ambient Occlusion, for depth and realism reducing the need for ray-traced rendering. The GeometryBoost capabilities of the FirePro line means features like Full-Scene Anti-Aliasing (FSAA) can be turned on in SolidWorks permanently without slowing down the workflow.
Eyefinity multi-display technology
Support for advanced design workflows, where SolidWorks users switch between applications including
SolidWorks Simulation and PhotoView 360 or other applications
The SolidWorks FirePro vs Quadro Benchmarks compares the FirePro V4900, V5900 and V7900 against the price comparable Quadro 600, 2000 and 4000.
Vegas Pro 11 is designed to take advantage of GPU acceleration for video FX, transitions, compositing, pan/crop, track motion and encoding. The series of test discussed below used an AMD FX 8150 8-core processor, 3.6 GHz, 8GB RAM, running Microsoft Windows 7 64-bit. The benchmarks evaluated preview and rendering with OpenCL GPU acceleration enabled on the AMD FirePro v4900, V5900 and V7900 and compared to the comparably priced NVIDIA Quadro 600, 2000 and 4000.
The Vegas Pro project consisted of seven segments in the timeline of varying complexity and length. Measurements were made of Final Render times, as well Preview performance at using “Best/Full” preview settings and the average “free run” frame rate.
If you are attending Game Developers Conference this year, be sure to check out the AMD Booth #914. Of course AMD will be showing off their gaming prowess with the Radeon HD 7970 and Fusion APU laptops.
But more interesting to me: Showing in the FirePro pod at the booth will be showing:
AMD Engineering Speaking Sessions
Congratulations to the winners of the Experience FirePro! Sweepstakes. The sweepstakes asked users of recent FirePro graphic cards to comment on their experience. From the entries, 3 winning names were randomly selected. Each winner will receive an new AMD FirePro V5900 workstation graphics card. The winners are:
This sweepstakes was the first step in a broader initiative designed to understand how graphics companies like AMD, Nvidia and Intel going to differentiate themselves and compete in the professional markets as these markets mature and raw performance specs become more of a commodity. Workstation graphics cards are no different from any other product competing in a mature market. You need to build brand trust and identity. So what will be the new defining characteristics of the professional graphics brands. Reliability? Compatibility? Energy management? GPU-CPU integration? Open standards/open source? Multi-display support?
If you have any ideas on this issue, please comment! If performance is a given, what other characteristics will be important to building brand perception?
Khronos is hosting a series of COLLADA Community Meet Ups to get end user input and feedback to help launch OpenCOLLADA. COLLADA is a non-proprietary file format for the exchange of digital assess and FX. The goal of the new OpenCOLLADA is to create rock-solid import/export capability across DCC (e.g. 3ds Max, Maya Blender) and CAD apps. The CAD industry is also exploring COLLADA 1.5 and Khronos is pushing forward to make COLLADA an ISO standard.
The first COLLADA Meetup is being held concurrently to GDC in San Francisco on March 7th. Sign-up to attend if you want to have a voice in COLLADA’s future. Khronos is seeking input from the 3D community, from individuals to companies.
More info here:
https://collada.org/mediawiki/index.php/Open_Letter_March_2012.
A complete unboxing and setup video for the new entry-level (in price) FirePro V3900 workstation graphics card. These short Newegg videos are actually the next best thing to actually unboxing and handling one of the cards. This one also has a series of Q&As which were put directly to the FirePro team.
One interesting Q&A was if you need a gaming card in addition to your FirePro? The answer, no, the latest FirePro drivers enable high-performance in games as well as pro apps. Another interesting point was that FirePro cards are made only by AMD so reliability is absolute. (This contrasts to gamer cards which are manufactured by third parties.)
Kind of a clever way to share specs about the HP Z Workstation - a little video of a duet rattling things off to the melody of The Beatles “All my Loving”.
Covers the basics from ISV certified to graphics from AMD
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