Tom's Hardware compares AMD FirePro and Nvidia Quadro cards and drivers using industry standard, publicly available benchmarks, across various anti-aliasing mode. This is a pretty comprehensive summary and directly compares all cards at all price points (MSRP prices ranging from a $119 FirePro V3900 to a $1910 Quadro 5000) directly against each other in full range of benchmarks.
The AMD FirePro V7900 (MSRP $882) outperforms all cards in Maya, SolidWorks, TeamCenter, NX, CAPS, Lightwave, Ensight. It comes in second behind the Quadro 5000 in Catia and Cinebench. And not surprisingly, it wales when in comes to OpenCL benchmarks.
Although performance benchmarks have only limited impact on real-world ROI, where other benefits can matter more, these results still are pretty interesting.
Performance benchmarks are great, but speed alone is becoming more of a commodity in graphics cards. This video looks at three ways that AMD FirePro graphics benefit SolidWorks users above and beyond the basic performance specs:
Higher productivity with multiple displays
Real-time previews including ambient occlusion in RealView
More accurate designs with full-scene anti-aliasing
The AMD FirePro team is at the 2012 SIMULIA Customer Conference in booth #14 running May 15 - 17, 2012. AMD FirePro graphics are certified for Abaqus technology in SIMULIA on 64-bit Windows and Linux platforms.
The photo below from the conference demonstrates OpenCL on FirePro graphics doubling performance of both routine and sophisticated engineering simulation in Abaqus/Standard and the single card, mutliple display advantage of Eyefinity.
Congratulations to Andrew Kramar, winner of the COE TOP GUN XXV competition and the grand prize of an AMD FirePro V7900 card.
TOP GUN is a competition for the “Best of the Best” CATIA engineers and designers to test their skills at developing the most accurate and correctly-structured three dimensional model, in the least amount of time.
This year the competition was to model a piece of the rotor for a helicopter, based on 3 or 4 drawings. Andrew accurately completed the task in just 21:16 minutes.
From Andrew: “For some reason I had a can of Mountain Dew just before the competition and since I don’t even drink coffee regularly, the caffeine in that thing was giving me the jitters like you wouldn’t believe. Who knows, maybe it helped because when I was all finished I starting thinking I must have missed something because everyone else was still sitting down! So I reviewed the drawing again for a second and I actually caught one radius that I had missed. After that I figured I would kill my time if I started double checking every dimension, so I decided to just go for it and “click the red box” hoping there weren’t any other mistakes. I had no idea whether or not I won or not until just yesterday. Dave from Inceptra did tell me that I had the fastest time, but they had not checked the accuracy yet. I’m pretty excited to get the shiny new graphics card. I’m looking forward to building a new system around it with a bit more capital than I would have had otherwise!
Thanks to all the sponsors: Dell, AMD, and Inceptra!”
The AMD FirePro team sent some pix from their booth at Siemens PLM World 2012. In addition to the always cool Eyefinity shots, I am also wanting one of those FirePro mugs!
The FireProGraphics website has been updated to include information specific to Creo 2.0 and the unique productivity gains enabled through the lastest generation of FirePro graphics.
The site brings together many of the benchmarks, white papers and videos I’ve written about previously and explains how AMD worked with PTC to not only increase performance 100s of fold, but also to increase accuracy and reliability.
If you are looking for a single resource that describes the real strengths of the VX900 FirePro graphics line for CAD or M&E, this site is worth a look. In addition to Creo Parametric 2.0, their is also a dedicated section for SolidWorks.
North American Eagle was at the COE 2012 Annual PLM Conference and TechniFair last week and met up with Antoine Reymond from the AMD FirePro team. NAE used AMD FirePro Graphic Cards in each of their Lenovo ThinkStations to drive their designs.
Who is North American Eagle? Their goal is to break the current world land speed record of 763 MPH (341.09 m/s), set on October 15, 1997. The American-Canadian team is converting a former USAF Lockheed F-104 jet fighter into one of the most sophisticated vehicles on earth.
AMD’s FirePro SDI-Link platform enables system integrators and ISVs to design fully featured SDI- and GPU-based solutions with ultra-low latency between AMD professional graphics cards and industry-standard third party SDI input/output cards (e.g. AJA, Bluefish444, Blackmagic Design, DELTACAST, DVS and Matrox).
Most everyone that I have talked to in the DCC or CAD is excited about the announcement of OpenCL acceleration for Adobe PhotoShop CS6 (and Premier Pro CS6).
AMD posted a blog and I just read an FAQ from Adobe on exactly what is accelerated in PhotoShop as well a which cards are tested and certified.
Below are some excerpts from the Adobe FAQ that are particularly relevant and interesting.
"The Mercury Graphics Engine (MGE) represents features that use video card, or GPU, acceleration. In Photoshop CS6, this new engine delivers near-instant results when editing with key tools such as Liquify, Warp, Lighting Effects and the Oil Paint filter. The new MGE delivers unprecedented responsiveness for a fluid feel as you work."
"MGE is new to Photoshop CS6, and uses both the OpenGL and OpenCL frameworks. It does not use the proprietary CUDA framework from nVidia."
"In order to use MGE, you must have a supported video card and updated driver. If you do not have a supported card, performance will be degraded.
Adobe tested the following cards: AMD FirePro 3800, 4800, 5800, 7800, 8800, 9800, 3900, 4900, 5900, 7900"
GPU features added in Photoshop CS6:
Adaptive Wide Angle Filter
Liquify
Oil Paint
Warp and Puppet Warp
Field Blur, Iris Blur, and Tilt/Shift (accelerated by compatible video
card supporting OpenCL)
FireUser.com is a community resource for CAD, visualization, 3D, video and engineering professionals to learn about the latest acceleration and display technologies and news with a focus on the AMD FirePro workstation graphics line.
