ATI FireGL V5000: Well-Rounded Mid-Range
by Derek Wilson on January 31, 2005 3:52 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Final Words
There are plenty of people out there who need a workstation card that's just a workstation card. If all your workstation needs to do is push some wireframe drawings around, this is not a bad part to go with.In fact, the ATI FireGL V5000 is a pretty nifty little card. In a few cases, this mid-range card ends up performing as well or better than an AGP part with more power, RAM, and a memory bus. The factors at work in those cases were a lower latency unbuffered RAM running on a system with newer platform drivers on a bus with bigger bandwidth. Looking at the pure graphics capabilities of the cards, there isn't a way the V5000 should be able to outperform the X3, so the explanation must rely on some other factor. But a benefit of the platform still counts as a benefit of the card.
Based on the numbers the posted here and the enthusiasm ATI had for not crippling the geometry power of their chip, we wouldn't be surprised to see 6 vertex 4 pixel configurations on the budget side in the future. ATI might have some other plans up their sleeves as well.
Currently, ATI holds 81% of the mobile workstation market (what little of one there is), but they see it as a growing segment. The FireGL V5000 might still be a little beefy for all but the largest laptops, but we could see massaging the idea a little bit and giving the mobile engineers some options. ATI was heavily hinting at some upcoming PCI Express mobile workstations that we might be very pleased with if we liked what we saw here.
All in all, the ATI solution is a very solid workstation card for the money if it is implemented in the proper environment. Stick with geometry heavy applications. In fact, if you prefer wireframe only modes, each application we tested ran superbly under the power of the FireGL V5000. PRO/E and Maya generally ran well under the V5000. Enabling things like shading and texturing in 3DStudio may become an issue. The ATI FireGL V5000 allows us to build a box with a midrange workstation card in a highend consumer platform that is able to surpass the performance (in some cases) of a >$5000 DP workstation stacked with the most powerful AGP offering from the competition. Realizing that, we can begin to see the potential of the new FireGL part.
But again, we can't stress enough that workstation applications require a degree of special attention. There are a great deal of enhancements ATI could include in their next generation FireGL but probably won't because it will be tied to their consumer level core. This is the same problem with the way NVIDIA approaches workstation graphics. Granted, they can both push huge frame rates, and geometry processing (while secondary) is still very fast.
The fact that ATI is willing to take a step back and evaluate the way they are looking at things like the geometry pipelines in their workstation parts gives us hope for the future. Here's to continued execution of ideas that make a whole lot of common sense.
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nadirshakur - Saturday, February 26, 2005 - link
please please please someone tell me what the hell is that thing in the middle, it looks like s-video but has three pins instead of the usual four on s-video i have the card and trying to connect it to my computer, someone please help, thanks!nadirshakur - Saturday, February 26, 2005 - link
nadirshakur - Saturday, February 26, 2005 - link
Draven31 - Wednesday, February 2, 2005 - link
But, it won't fix the occasional OpenGL errors you'll get by risking putting an ATI card in your workstation. No thanks.Shadowmage - Tuesday, February 1, 2005 - link
Damn, that's pretty bad. nVidia's going with a mere THREE vertex shader card?Yeah, I didn't mean to demean your review; I just think that getting $500 performance with a $200 card is rather amusing. That's even better than getting $550 performance (X850XT PE) out of a $400 card (X800 Pro VIVO)!
And yeah, there are some driver hacks that let you install the workstation drivers on an UNMODIFIED consumer card.
DerekWilson - Tuesday, February 1, 2005 - link
Shadowmage ...There are a few other factors that go into it, but the silion they've stuck on there is the same as the x700.
The differences are the fact that the X700 lacks the 2 Silicon Image TMDS transmitters for 2x dual-link dvi, the stereo connector, has a different bios, and also uses different drivers. Build quality is also generally better with pro boards, and cap/resistor/pcb layouts are slightly different in some cases.
The reason we focused on the hardware rather than on the consumer part from which it is derived is that we are going to take a look at NVIDIA's 3 vertex 8 pixel workstatoin design shortly. We would rather see NVIDIA go with a 6 vertex 8 pixel design for their workstation as well, but this would have meant deviating from their consumer desing (6600). It just so happened that ATI was lucky and their consumer part fit what we wanted to see in a midrange workstation.
We want to encourage NVIDIA and ATI to look at their workstation parts as requiring different silicon. Maybe eventually they will actually start doing things the right way with respect to the end user. Of course, maybe I poured that message on a little thick at the beginning, but we feel it's very important.
By the way, there was actually a guide to modding r3xx cards to their respective fgl cards on adrian's rojak pot in january. We haven't seen documentation on modding r4xx based cards into the fgl v series. It's interesting to note that it's not enough to simply flash the bios and install the drivers -- ati makes it more difficult than that.
Derek Wilson
Shadowmage - Tuesday, February 1, 2005 - link
LOLThis is just the X700 with a different driver! :D
phaxmohdem - Tuesday, February 1, 2005 - link
LOL I just found the pricing info. My bad. Great job Anand.And BTW
1st and 2nd Post's bitches!!! (since that seems to be the staple of bragging rights these days for whatever reason.)
phaxmohdem - Tuesday, February 1, 2005 - link
Crap! A story thats been up for nearly 24 hours with no comment love.....Fear not I have not forsaken thee!!
I wish I could find pricing information on this card. Looks to be perfect for my needs dabling in 3D design.