Workstation graphics from AMD appear to have an edge over its green rivals pretty much since the FireGL team in Germany came out with a next-gen driver for R600-based cards. The strategy to offer more memory and better OpenGL performance at a lower cost has started to bear fruits.

Today, ATI (sorry, AMD) introduced another FireGL part, this time based on the RV670, a chip the world knows as the Radeon HD 3800 series. The new FireGL V7700 integrates the ATI RV670GL GPU with 512 MB of Samsung's GDDR4 memory and two features we are sure AMD's marketing staff is proud to talk about: PCI Express Gen2 and DisplayPort.

Performance-wise, this new card is going against Nvidia's Quadro FX 3700 and 4600. The 7700 is priced at $1099, which compares to street prices of about $800 - $900 for the 3700 and $1400 - 1500 for the 4600 version.