AMD Releases Five High-Performance Graphics Accelerators

By DE Editors

Aug. 6, 2007
At SIGGRAPH 2007 in San Diego today, AMD (Santa Clara, CA) announced five new high-performance ATI FireGL workstation graphics accelerators for MCAD, medical imaging, and DCC professionals. The ATI FireGL V8650, FireGL V8600, FireGL V7600, FireGL V5600, and FireGL V3600 graphics boards are based on the next-generation ATI graphics processing unit (GPU) with a unified shader architecture featuring up to 320 individual stream processing units. These new boards deliver acceleration of DirectX 10- and OpenGL 2.1-based professional applications, which says AMD, results in an increase in performance of more than 300 percent as compared to its previous generation of product.

This new series of ATI FireGL workstation graphics boards has several features. According to AMD, the ATI FireGL V8650 represents and industry first with 2GB of on-board memory, enabling engineers and designers to interact with larger datasets and more complex models. The ATI FireGL unified shader architecture maximizes graphics throughput for today’s engineering and animation software. During performance tests, the ATI FireGL V5600 demonstrated more than 300 percent of the performance of the ATI FireGL V5200 running the Viewperf 9.0.3 UGS Teamcenter Visualization Mockup (tcvis-01) benchmark test.

AMD’s unique AutoDetect feature instinctively optimizes the graphics driver based on the user’s specific software applications even while running multiple programs simultaneously. With AutoDetect, end users are no longer required to manually adjust application specific settings, even when toggling between different applications.

All ATI FireGL visualization products use a unified driver, which simplifies installation, deployment, and maintenance, while support for Microsoft Vista enables future compatibility. Native multi-card support maximizes output flexibility by enabling larger displays, higher resolutions and the ability to drive four screens from two graphics cards in the same workstation. In addition, stream computing applications can leverage the massively parallel processing capability of the GPU for compute-intensive tasks such as physics, structural analysis, and financial modeling.

The new series of ATI FireGL workstation graphics accelerators from AMD are expected to begin shipping in September 2007 and will be available from workstation OEMs, system integrators, and channel partners worldwide.

Pricing: $2799 (ATI FireGL V8650 with 2GB memory); $1899 (ATI FireGL V8600 with 1GB memory); $999 (ATI FireGL V7600 with 512MB memory); $599 (ATI FireGL V5600 with 512MB); $299 (ATI FireGL V3600 with 256MB memory).

For more information about ATI FireGL products from AMD, please click here.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.