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AMD Releases FirePro V5900 and V7900 Workstation GPUs
primesuspect writes "Today AMD released two new workstation GPUs: The FirePro V5900 and V7900, aimed at the mid- and high-end workstation card market."
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Typically, the "workstation" card makes you pay out the nose per unit silicon(though, at the same time, the top of the "workstation" range is going to be the only place to find the maximum RAM available to that generation, along with genlock and similar); but the "gamer" card will probably skimp on things like double-precision math and drivers that don't suck for anything other than playing Metal of Duty Crysis Evolved.
A summary since we don't seem to have a good one here:
AMD releases two new video cards targeted at the CAD type audience competing with the Quadro line from Nvidia. The hardware itself isn't anything you couldn't find in your average high end gaming card, but new but they've done stupid amount of driver optimisation for design work which is why these cards cost more. More interesting though is how (comparatively) low AMD has priced these models ($599 and $999).
From the Article:
"We’ll do a follow-up article with the charts and graphs that the more pedantic among you expect, along with some interesting comparisons to other products, but in the meantime, I will summarize it with this: In SpecViewperf 11, the V7900 is about neck-and-neck with the $4000 NVIDIA Quadro 6000, and in some tests exceeded the legendary Q6000."
The consumer cards actually do make sense. For nVidia, it's "first number is the generation, second number is the part within that generation" - a 580 is better than a 570, but worse than a 590. Likewise, a 480 is newer than a 280, but not as new as a 580. You can also generally make the assertion that cards with the same ending numbers, but different generations, will fill the same role (and same rough price), but the newer one will be slightly better. AMD/ATI uses four numbers, but the last is always a 0 and can be ignored. They essentially follow a similar patter - first number is generation, middle two are part within that generation, and last one is a zero (to make it look cooler). So a 5870 is better than a 5770, but not as good as a 5970. And a 5970 is older than a 6990, but newer than a 4970. AMD recently changed how their within-generation numbers go, so you can't just assume that, say, a 6970 will outperform a 5970 (it won't, actually), but comparisons within a generation are still good. And these are hardly new - ATI/AMD has used that patten since 2006, while nVidia has been using theirs since 2008 (prior to that, they had a 4-digit number (really two digits with a 00 at the end) and a few letters).
The workstation cards, though, are an absolute mess. About the only claim you can even generally defend is that "bigger numbers are better". And even that is rather iffy. And trying to figure out which consumer card a workstation card was based on requires an encyclopedia of them.
While I imagine workstation cards can get away with having non-linear names like that (since anyone buying a $3,500 graphics card will do their research), I imagine even professionals get confused by it all easily.
between a 300W $500 high-end gaming video card and a $500 "workstation" card that consumes half the power? What is missing from the workstation card?
What's missing from the card? Certification for SolidWorks, Inventor, etc is missing from the consumer card.