For the last 24 hours I’ve been sat in a dark room playing with AMD’s brand new professional graphics card, the ATI FirePro V8800. Oh what an exciting life I lead!
The fact is it’s an exceptional 3D card and one that literally ripped through our SolidWorks 2010 graphics benchmark – making incredibly light work of manipulating our RealView model. It’s also got some interesting new technology called Eyefinity that supports multiple monitors and if, like me, you’re frustrated by ALT/TABBING your way through apps, could certainly do wonders for your productivity.
Unfortunately we didn’t get to test this feature out but hope to soon – contrary to popular belief we don’t have dozens of spare monitors lying around the DEVELOP3D office.
Over the next few months AMD is set to introduce other FirePro cards based on the same core technology and we’ll test these out as soon as we can get our hands on them. In addition, if the rumours are correct, some new Quadro FX cards from Nvidia are also due out soon, so we’ll hopefully add these into the mix for some sort of graphics card showdown.
If your workstation currently clunks away when rotating 3D models, and if you’ve got some spare cash, the next few months would be an excellent time to invest in some new 3D technology. And with the recent introduction of Intel’s new Xeon X5600 series six core processors, there’s a phenomenal amount of processing power to back it up if you can stretch to an all in one workstation.
For a full review of the ATI FirePro V8800, click here.
