The FirePro V3750 provides a single DVI-I port and two DP connectors, and comes with three useful adapters: DP to single link DVI-I, DVI-I to VGA, and DVI-I to component RGB. Yet the board outperforms last year’s entry-level graphics card while costing significantly less. With a memory bandwidth of 24.4GBps, the board still retains the small form factor as the V3700 and also keeps power consumption to just 48 watts. This board offers the same amount of memory as the V3700 but its new GPU provides 320 Stream processing units and increases the memory interface to 128-bit. Not wanting to short change entry-level users, AMD also released a more powerful entry-class board, the FirePro V3750 ($199 MSRP/$169 street).
The board provides two DVI-I ports, both supporting Dual Link. The FirePro V3700 requires a single PCI Express X16 slot and consumes just 32 watts of power. The more modest GPU and a memory bandwidth of just 15GBps results in a slight decrease in performance but enables AMD to offer this entry-level 3D graphics board for less than $100, another industry first. While those specs are similar to the previous generation FireGL V3600, the board’s GPU features just 40 unified shaders (compared to 120 in the V3600). All but the entry-level FirePro V3700 include a single DVI-I connector and a pair of the new DisplayPort (DP) connectors.Īt the entry level, the new ATI FirePro V3700 ($99 MSRP/$85 average street price) provides 256MB of GDDR3 memory with a 64-bit memory controller. All four boards are also PCI Express 2.0 compatible, support hardware acceleration of DirectX 10.1 and OpenGL 2.1 advanced features, and are compliant with Shader Model 4.1.
With AutoDetect, users no longer need to manually adjust application-specific driver settings to achieve top performance.Īll four boards in the new FirePro V-series are designed with a 10-bit display pipeline and support for high dynamic range (HDR) rendering, enabling the boards to produce more than one billion colors.
The new boards provide equal or better performance than last year’s FireGL boards at significantly lower prices.Īll of the new FirePro V-series graphics accelerators also include AMD’s AutoDetect feature, which optimizes the graphics driver based on the user’s specific software applications even while running multiple programs simultaneously. Now AMD has completed the refresh of its entire workstation graphics product line with four new ATI FirePro V-series boards, including the top-of-the-line FirePro V8700, which we previously reviewed ( see DE, April 2009). More recently, the company became the first to introduce a 3D workstation-class graphics card with DisplayPort support. The company also set a new industry milestone with its introduction of the first 2GB workstation graphics accelerator. Last year, AMD began catching up, introducing its own new generation GPUs designed around a unified shader architecture, which the company calls Stream processors.
NVIDIA, its primary competitor, beat ATI to the punch with its unified graphics architecture, replacing dedicated geometry engines and pixel shaders with a new design in which the power of the graphics processing unit (GPU) can be dynamically allocated to vertex or pixel shading, improving performance for all types of professional users. But after being acquired in 2006 by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), ATI seemed to lose its way for a while.
For years, ATI was the first to introduce new technology: the first PCI Express-based boards and the first workstation-class graphics accelerator with 1GB of onboard memory.