AMD Launches ATI FirePro V8800; Cheap at $1499

Glad to see ATI stretching its wings.

How does it perform against Tesla?

If I seen one of them at where I work I would have lost my job already.

If only Adobe wouldn`t have been such an asses to have support in their CS5 suite only for nvidia now i`m wishing for their Flash to fail over HTML5 ... and this comming from a nvidia user.

There is a registry entry you can use to allow the use of all kinds of GPU's. If you go to the plugins section of their site and go to extra, or additional (something like that) plugins.. it's there. It'll allow it to work.

care to post a link ?

IS CS5 out somewhere? wtf over.

Anyway, I have no use for tesla or firepro, but as is often mentioned here; the competition (between ati and nvidia) will only help everyone on either side of the fence.

"How does it perform against Tesla?"

This should be compared to Quadro, not Tesla. AFAIK AMD doesn't have anything out there that competes with Tesla.

but...can it play crisis?

It can play "render an MRI of your brain from a massive blunt force trauma".

The question is "Can it run Crysis on maximum with eyefinity?"
Answer: no

I know this was in humor, but it makes me wonder: If money were no object would this card offer any performance benefits over, say, a 5970? Or is the card design just not able to cope well with games?

No problemo - This is for Windows: http://www.adobe.com/support/downl [...] ftpID=4056 and this is for Mac OSX: http://www.adobe.com/support/downl [...] ftpID=4051

I don't think it runs direct x or shader models not to sure but something must not fit. either that or it just doesn't perform well enough in games to be worth the price.

I found out about this because I have CS4 and an NVIDIA GTX260 but I am running it on Windows XP x64. Adobe doesn't officially support XP x64 Edition and of course it doesn't recognize my GPU as being supported. Of course it is! Anyway, I actually found out about this on YouTube by some flamer wanting to take the credit for finding this out when in actuality he grabbed it straight from Adobe and just showed everyone how to modify the registry to allow (pretty much all gpu's) to work with CS4. Even Intel's integrated video works. Cheers.

I don't know about this card, but TOMS did do an article about workstation cards vs gaming cards. Obviously they were both at their best in their environment, but no workstation cards are not > gaming cards for gaming. Even if they do cost 3x more. It's simply not what their made for.

Hah. And my non-PC gaming friends try and tell me that gaming graphics cards are expensive.

Most workstation grade cards are physically the same as consumer grade cards. The firmware and drivers are usually different to allow for better performance in workstation applications. The increased cost comes from increased support in terms of drivers and help.

No. For two reasons -

A) The Economy Sucks
B) My director doesn't believe that Autocad gets a substantial boost from workstation cards.

Amazing power, too bad it's not for rendering smoke nades

What would be the result if you took one of these and tried to run crysis? Would it destroy the 5970?????

Isn't that what most stations in Hospitals in general use when they need to show an "MRI Scan" result?
http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/ [...] ing/xenia/




Support and good drivers is the answer to those prices.

People, please go read/see this excellent article on Workstation GPUs vs. Desktopp GPUs.

http://tech.icrontic.com/articles/ [...] ktop-gpus/

IMO a dekstop GPU *can* perform ok for *most* workstation tasks but a work station GPU would not fair well in gaming..simply not designed for it. Mainly because of the drivers.

In CAD related tasks, a workstation card can get 300% or more performance over its desktop equivalent. As far as Firepro Vs Quadro it depends on the app. Typically FirePro is better in DirectX based applications.

This is very good for ATI, enterprise sales have a huge markup because it can, but this is what balances books on both sides, hopefully it can beat a tesla and give ATI the lead for workstation cards.

they show workstation cards running professional apps faster but if you use rivatuner to trick the system into thinking you have a workstation card, you get those same performance benefits, just with out the insane price.

They use the same GPU for their gaming and workstation cards, the only true difference in terms of performance is drivers.

many pro apps will not make use of hardware acceleration unless they see a workstation card running and with they are tricked, they run just as fast.

While there are things such as 30 bit color, at both the consumer level and the professional level especially in graphic design, stuff like that is never used.

A few of my friends are into some serious graphic designing and will have their hacked quadro setups running for months on end, and in some cases taking weeks to render a single image, those systems are stable and cheap.

while there some truly extra features in actual workstation cards, most professionals will never use them and in areas where those unbenchmarkable features are not used, the consumer lever card for a fraction of the cost will perform just as good as the workstation card equivalent

PS and I am sure the 30 bit color can be used on a consumer level card also. when I use the quadro driver hack, I get extra features and those extra features are fully functional.

the whole workstation market is mainly designed to get more money out of the people with deeper pockets

PS did you know that a 9800GTX and a GTX 280 cost about the same much to make?

videocards have huge profit margins. when you buy the latest videocard, 90-96% of that money is pure profit for the company

the thing is that workstation cards are designed to target people with more money, so if you can get a regular consumer/ gamer to buy your videocard for $400-500 then you will make a huge profit, but what about the professionals who have deep pockets? Well you use cleaver marketing to get them to spend $1500 for the same card then it is like selling 3-4 cards instead of just 1. Also at those prices, the production cost becomes almost negligible and possibly even rounded 0%

It is kinda like that dave chappelle skit when people found out that he was rick, suddenly the price of everything skyrocketted.

it is the same with videocards. I am a poor gamer, I need the latest and greatest. Sure here you go, that will be $500

Rich producer or company owner. Hi, I am looking for the latest and greatest videocard *while talking, a fly lands on the table, rich person pulls out a $100 bill then crushes the fly with it then tosses it into the trash*. Sure here is the latest and greatest videocard, that will be $1500; hey! you sold the card to the other person for $500. The sales person says: thats the old price.


Or how about that video or the wedding cake http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gimiDBAK2wA
thats is what workstation cards really are, marketing.
expensive event calls for expensive cake because when you throw 20K around for an event, an expensive cake doesn't seem so expensive anymore. Humans like to compare.

when you buy a house for $400,000, if theres a closing fee of like $1000, you wont think much of it. But if you bought a pack of gun and there was a $1000 tax on it then suddenly it is a major deal. Workstation cards are priced to the event

Also wanted to add that this is all digital. the other hardware on the card cant magically make it do more in terms of processing.
Have you seen a motherboard that will make a Intel Pentium 2 run 64 bit code. The most important thing is the GPU. so basically when it comes to what the card can do on the processing and software end, it is all in the drivers

sorry dude... even though i did not read what u wrote... i had to down rank you because what u wrote is not a comment... it's an article.

Sorry but I read half your article and these statments are false:

PS did you know that a 9800GTX and a GTX 280 does not cost the same much to make?

videocards have huge profit margins. when you buy the latest videocard, 90-96% of that money is pure profit for the company- False, in fact a 280 Core cost 100$+ to manufacture, 5870 Core cost ~60$, Fermi ~150$, so its NOT 90%+ profit lmao So Fermis core ~150$, extra components etc will up the cost let say to 250$( Its actually even more considering the cooler) so thats less than 50% profit. You cant deny the Core price considering they have Billions of transistors.

thnx for cs4 reg hack mlop

Meh. I've played it. It's OK. I mean, its better than playing Crysis, but not by much.

Yes they do, it's called the FireStream card.... look it up.