The name FireGL is rising from the ashes of Diamond after ATi bought what was left of the original FireGL company.
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| ATI FIRE GL 8800 ... with gasoline | |
| (Review by MS, June 22, 2002) |
Summary
After years of absence, the name FireGL makes a come-back, this time it is ATi instead of Diamond Multimedia who are carrying the FireGL brand name. Positioned as a budget solution rather than a true competitor with the high-end solutions from nVidia and 3DLabs, the FireGL has a lot to offer and a few things that are missing. We have taken the card and run it through the mills, ripped it apart and put it back together on any system possible as long as it was fast enough. Where are the weak spots, where are the tweaks and how much work is still needed on the drivers? Those are the questions and we don't have all answers but we have some facts.
At a point in PC technology where frame rates become abundant and fill rates are limited only by the memory interface, that is bus width and protocol as well as frequency and latencies, mainstream graphics cards serve performance, reserved only 2 years ago for the high end cards but where have the high end cards gone?
AcesHardware had a pretty good article on this subject recently , so I don't have to wade through all the details here. Instead, being a bottom feeder, I am going to concentrate on the least expensive card in their round-up, that is the ATI FireGL 8800. When I started working on this article a few weeks ago, I had several questions, particularly with respect to placement of these cards in a highly competitive market.
The name FireGL is rising from the ashes of Diamond after ATi bought what was left of the original FireGL company.
Moreover, I had the concept of workstations based on e.g. dual processor systems combined with these cards which sounds especially appealing with the AMD MPX platform. In other words, combining the ultimate floating point experience on the CPU level with the ultimate performance on the GPU level for under $1000 sounds like a winning concept for entry level professional graphics applications. If looks can be deceiving, sounds are even worse and it is all because there was a flaw in the logic to begin with. Never mind, though, we found a lot of other things to do. And we found some pretty interesting stability and performance issues as well.
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