LOSTCIRCUITS

Summary

Even though the professional graphics market is small compared to the consumer segment, it is extremely prestigious and, moreover, blessed with very high profit margins, at least in comparison to the actual manufacturing cost of the cards. Over the past 5 years, nVidia has established a dominance in this market, of the former big players like Obsidian and others, only 3DLabs has survived under the new umbrella of Creative Labs.

Following in the footsteps of their success in the consumer market segment, ATI, after the acquisition of what was left of FireGL has started their own foray into the professional market, dominated by OpenGL applications used for VPU-based rendering of CAD, as well as cinematic "CGI" effects. The latest family of FireGL cards encompasses the FireGL X1-128, which is a variation of the RADEON 9700 blueprint. Regardless of the capabilities of the R300 core, it was developed with the primary focus on DX9 and visual effects like AntiAliasing and Anisotopic Filtering, neither of which matters in the high end market. The question, therefore is, whether the raw power of the R300 engine is enough to compete in the professional world where it cannot play out its "special features and capabilities". Read on ...

ATI FireGL X1-128

For nVidia, these days are over, the new Quadro4 cores are internally different from the equivalent consumer GPUs and, therefore, the small modifications necessary to break ground for the BIOS change that, in turn, enables acceptance of the drivers do no longer work. What exactly those changes are, is not disclosed by nVidia, one thing we know off is the dynamic memory allocation of the on-board frame buffer. That is, most graphics cards divide the on-board memory into a texture and a geometry buffer with fixed allocation of memory space for either task. According to nVidia, the Quadro series does not have these hard boundaries, and the entire memory space can be allocated on an "as needed" basis.

ATI's FireGL series still appears much more related to their RADEON ancestry, in fact, only a single resistor on the RADEON 9700 needs to be changed to enable FireGL (X1-128) functionality. Keep in mind, though, that a single resistor can change a lot, especially if it is on the GPU package itself rather than on the board. Taking a very powerful VPU with its floating point pixel precision, and eight pixel pipelines and converting it to suit professional applications certainly sounds appealing but there are a number of caveats: The professional world does not care about "nice" visuals, AntiAliasing and anisotopic filtering are no selling points when it comes down to precision rendering. DX9 compliance and capabilities are not necessarily selling arguments either when it comes to a market where OpenGL is the dominant environment.

By the end of the day, it comes down to the question of how well has ATI been able to port the R300 core, developed to excel in DX9, in highly-specialized OpenGL applications. We have taken the FireGL X1-128 and compared it to two very powerful competitors, that is the 3Dlabs Wildcat 990 featuring no less than 512 MB of on-board memory and, on the other side, the nVidia Quadro4 980XGL, a spin-off of the GeForce4. Neither of these cards has DX9 capabilities, both are relatively ancient designs but both of them were also developed specifically with OpenGL in mind and nothing much else. As a sneak preview, it will be a head to head race.

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