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Graphics Software Entertainment Games Technology

ATI Introduces FireGL V5000 110

Posted by Zonk from the shiny-can-be-expensive dept.
karvind writes "Folks at Tomshardware> are running a review of ATI's new FireGL V5000. The card's X700 processor, code named R410GL, is based on a 110-nanometer process and the card sports eight pixel pipelines, six geometry engines, 128 MB of GDDR3 memory, dual DVI connectors for multi-display applications and dual link support for 9 megapixels displays. Anandtech also posted a review."
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ATI Introduces FireGL V5000 More

ATI Introduces FireGL V5000

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  • Wow (Score:2, Funny)

    by TheKidWho ( 705796 )
    The video card for the rest of us...
    • he card's X700 processor, code named R410GL, is based on a 110-nanometer process and the card sports eight pixel pipelines, six geometry engines, 128 MB of GDDR3 memory the question is, Can it run Doom 3?

  • Man! (Score:2)

    by Faust7 ( 314817 )
    It has "Fire" in its name and it's red! Is Ati trying to create its own ill omens?
  • ...because us linux n00bs have no idea how to get ATI cards to work in Linux. I love you nVidia!
  • Since this product is aimed at the mid-range market with its price-tag of $699...

    I do understand that is a mid-range market price and card, but, damn, I just bought my son a very nice computer with a very servicable video card for less than that.

  • Pointless benchmark? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by rokzy ( 687636 ) on Saturday February 26, 2005 @05:44PM (#11789810)
    they take an OpenGL workstation card, the only type of ATI card with proper linux support, and benchmark it on XP SP2?

    • Re:Pointless benchmark? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Rufus211 ( 221883 ) <rufus-slashdot@@@hackish...org> on Saturday February 26, 2005 @06:45PM (#11790138) Homepage
      (-1, Troll)

      The first linux drivers ATI released were for their firegl line of workstation cards. You could hack them to work with the normal cards, but for quite a while now ATI has provided drivers that work with all the cards. In fact, you can read anandtech's review of ATI and nVidia cards under Linux here [anandtech.com].
      • (-1, Troll) to you too.

        I said only the firegl has proper linux support. this is true. I'm not talking about hacked drivers released once or twice a year for out of date versions of X. I'm talking about support written on the card box and backed up with full customer service.
        • Actually the truth is somewhere between the two. There is no hack to the drivers to get them to work outside of the firegl line. The same drivers work out of the box on any recent Ati chipset and they are DESIGNED to do this. You don't get support on the box, but you do get some customer support. The drivers released for the "regular" chipset are the same drivers released for the FireGL, so the "once or twice a year" thing applies to both (I think there were actually five released last year, but only tw

  • Folks, WORKSTATION card, not gaming (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MightyPez ( 734706 ) on Saturday February 26, 2005 @05:44PM (#11789811)
    These cards are meant to be used for workstation uses like 3D editing and creation. These aren't gaming cards. I realize you bought your gaming card for far less, but these are a completely different product.
  • Since this product is aimed at the mid-range market with its price-tag of $699 (630), potential customers can't expect the full feature set.

    Hold the friggin' phone. 700$ is mid-range? What, do you have to take a second mortgage out to get top of the line stuff?

    Anyway, it's good to see that ATI is going with V**** enumerations to match NVidia's Quadro FX ***** enumerations. Those X700/X800 and 6600/6800 patterns were too easy to remember, IMHO. It's not a free market unless you're confusing the hell out o
    • omg omg omg the corporations are out to get us!!!! run for cover!!!

      You are being overly ignorant, these video cards are Workstation graphics card. The higher end versions usually cost somewhere in the range of $2,000 and above. Not to mention the software that actually benefits from these cards cost on the order of $1,000-$10,000+.

      Yes they certainly are gouging the engineers because you know, engineers can't keep track of numbers...
    • $700 is still mid-range. You want high end....check this out:

      http://www.sgi.com/products/visualization/prism/

    • Re:Sometimes I get confused... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Jeff DeMaagd ( 2015 ) on Saturday February 26, 2005 @05:56PM (#11789883) Homepage Journal
      If you are paying engineers and designers $60k or more a year, it makes sense to provide them a product that maximizes their productivity.

      Workstation cards are optimized, validated and supported for specific products. Companies that make software these things use heavily test their products using specific driver revisions. Compared to the annual wage of the people that use this, that's peanuts. Think Avid, SolidWorks, Renderman and such. Don't think Blender or other consumer or hacker software.
      • Okay, I'll have to take your word for it, but 700$ still seems steep, though, considering how it's been shown possible to manually hack some of the gaming cards with the hardware equivalent into FireGL cards.

        As stated in someone else's post that covered the hack -- "As many of you already know, the GPUs that ATI use in their desktop graphics cards are the same GPUs used in their workstation-grade graphics cards. The reason for the performance differences between desktop and workstation graphics cards lie i
        • Seems like you're paying an extra few hundred dollars for software, not hardware.

          Exactly. High quality OpenGL drivers optimized for professional applications are expensive to develop. They also are not necessarily going to give you the performance you would want for OpenGL games. So ATI doesn't just use the same drivers for both.
          I think on the consumer level, ATI is primarily concerned with DirectX and creates a tuned OpenGL driver that implements features required by popular OpenGL gaming engines (i.e. Qu
        • The ATI V5000 has a dual-link DVI output, and apart from other FireGLs and a recently introduced Macintosh card there IS NO video card for PCs on the market that features a dual-link DVI output.

          Why should anybody care?

          If you want to hook up the 30" Apple LCD monitor, you NEED a dual-link DVI interface, and boy, have I been drooling over the 30" monitor ever since it was introduced.
          (Not that I could afford it at its $3000 list price, but that's a different topic.)

  • Ati Schmati (Score:1, Informative)

    by darth_silliarse ( 681945 )
    Bet the drivers suck for a year as usual, just in time for the next product line....
  • "based on a 110-nanometer process and the card sports eight pixel pipelines, six geometry engines..." How many geometry engines does your card have?

  • How do these compare (Score:4, Interesting)

    by xRelisH ( 647464 ) on Saturday February 26, 2005 @05:55PM (#11789880)
    to regular video cards? I've always been curious that exactly these cards offer ( other than more raw power ) over regular video cards other than the dual DVI setup.

    Are there any benchmarks comparing regular video cards versus these graphic workstation cards on modelling? Also, how do these cards do in games? Do these cards perhaps do worse in games ( optimizations toward different types of rendering, like more photo-realistic hardware rendering that isn't that distinguishable for games but is for 3d work )

    • Re:How do these compare (Score:5, Informative)

      by TheKidWho ( 705796 ) on Saturday February 26, 2005 @06:00PM (#11789905)
      The drivers are more optimized for the tasks that they perform. And yes there are benchmarks, and no they are not better then gaming specific cards. Usually the gaming specific video cards beat the living shit out of the workstation graphics cards.

      Here [anandtech.com]

    • I've always been curious that exactly these cards offer ( other than more raw power ) over regular video cards other than the dual DVI setup.

      Workstation cards have more hardware for switching between rendering contexts and for multi-window overlap tests. Along with faster clock speeds and more pixel pipelines as well as support for overlay and underlay planes.

      Since games run in full-screen mode, you only need one rendering context, can skip the multi-window overlap tests, and dump the overlay/underlay pl
      • Actually, clockspeeds are often lower than the game card counterparts. Mostly they're just enabling workstation specific features.
    • These workstation class card offer more than just speed. They have special features enabled that are useful only for workstation applications. Features like anti-aliased line drawing, useless for games, but critical for CAD and similar workstation apps.

      Actually, these cards strictly speaking are often slower versions of their gaming counterparts. FPS is not as important for workstation purposes. Most cards are fast enough to display the datasets needed in most workstation apps. When you buy one of the

  • Aren't FireGLs the same as regular cards? (Score:4, Informative)

    by BigBuckHunter ( 722855 ) on Saturday February 26, 2005 @06:12PM (#11789967)
    If I remember correctly, ATI fireGL cards are the same chip as their normal line, with one or two resistors added/removed from the external chip packaging. All you have to do is:

    1: Remove/add the resistors and change the BIOS.
    or

    2: Used a readily available hacked driver to recognize your stock card as a FireGL

    All in all, there is no market for a 128MB solid modeling card. We had 128MB video cards in 1996 (Glint based). This card would be a huge step backward for a number of engineers.

    BBH

  • Damnit! When will they stop? (Score:5, Funny)

    by multiplexo ( 27356 ) on Saturday February 26, 2005 @06:38PM (#11790104) Journal
    I just sold my left kidney so I could afford an nVidia 6800. I'm not selling a testicle just so I can upgrade my video card! Unless it gives me a 3fps framerate increase in Doom III, then I might consider it.

  • from the anandtech article:
    Date: January 31st, 2005
  • Wow! This must be a great product with all the X's and four digit numbers in all the coded names!

    I've got to tell Boddicker before he uses the Cobra gun on the SUX3000!
  • Why is a midrange workstation FireGL video card being discussed in slashdot/games. This is not your gamer's video card, This is meant for OpenGL apps in a workstation setting.
  • The 30" Apple LCD monitor REQUIRES a dual-link DVI card.
    The ATI V5000 card has dual link capability on one of its output channels.
    Thus, they SHOULD work together.

    Now, has anybody tried, do they ACTUALLY work together in real life?
    (Not that I have the $3700 lying around that will pay for both the graphics card and the monitor.)

  • Confirmation (Score:3, Informative)

    by Dixie Flatliner ( 850959 ) on Sunday February 27, 2005 @02:37AM (#11792843)
    Workstation cards provide almost no performance for games, unless those games are entirely OpenGL based, in which case they simply provide very poor performance. They do however run Maya and other high end rendering environments, something even your papa's SLI 6800U can't handle. Although I've tried another FireGL card in this performance range and was less then impressed. Stick with a FX3000 Quadro if you're at all serious about what you do.

    And yes, it will work perfectly with an Apple 30" Cinema display.

    Apple 30" Cinema
    Dual Xeon 3.2GHz
    4GB ECC DDR RAM
    Quadro FX3400
  • The specs on the card look nice, though I have to wonder why it only has 128mb of memory for a "mid-range" card. Most other mid-range cards tend to have at least 256mb of ram, and nearly all of the high end cards have at least 512 megs of ram (the card I've been eyeing, though can't really justify the cost of right now has 640mb of memory). Of course, it's been quite a while since I've used either a FireGL or a Quatro, last I remember neither of the cards offered much bang for the buck or could really co
  • Workstation cards have three major differences from Gaming cards.

    First and most important is accuracy of display. If you are trying to snap to a point on a 12mb model, it can be SOMEWHAT annoying if it is not displayed correctly on the screen. Some gaming cards do not even come close to displaying 3d wireframes correctly. In one machine (briefly) worked on this was almost a half-inch on the display. Not being able to see the line you want to pick can be a problem.

    Secondly OpenGL (i.e. hardware accele

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