AMD's new FirePro V3900 is the company's low-profile, entry-level workstation graphics card. It's priced to compete against Nvidia’s Quadro 400. Today we're putting it up against Nvidia’s Quadro 400 and five other professional and desktop graphics cards.
Low-cost workstation graphics cards certainly aren't designed to be gaming racehorses. Rather, they're meant to be good enough for a number of mainstream professional tasks. After the recent launch of AMD's FirePro V3900, we were given an opportunity to find out what such basic cards can do, and how well AMD's entry-level card stacks up against its competition.
The FirePro V3900 is aggressively priced compared to what you're probably used to seeing for a workstation-oriented board, currently selling for about $110. According to AMD, the card competes against Nvidia’s Quadro 400, which is offered at a similar price. We decided to benchmark not only those two cards, but also Nvidia's Quadro 600, a Radeon HD 6570, a GeForce GT 430, a GeForce GT 440, and the brand-new Radeon HD 7750. We know those other cards weren't designed to contend in the professional space. However, we're curious as to how they'll do, given similar specifications.
Good Old Friends in New Clothes
AMD's FirePro V3900 features a Turks-based GPU and is quite similar to the Radeon HD 6570. The previously-launched FirePro V4900 sports a more complex Turks-based GPU and is more easily compared to the Radeon HD 6670. According to AMD’s roadmap, Turks will continue to persist until 2015, which is all the more reason to put this little V3900 through its paces.
Of course, we know that the Turks GPU is a descendant of Barts, which powers the Radeon HD 6800-series cards, and which itself is a descendant of Cypress, the GPU driving AMD's older Radeon HD 5800-series cards. Turks, however, only has six SIMD engines, each of which consists of sixteen thread processors. Each thread processor has five stream processors (ALUs). The SIMD blocks have four texture units. And thus, a Turks chip has a grand total of 24 texture units and 480 ALUs. The DRAM is attached via two 64-bit memory interfaces, for an aggregate 128-bit bus. Moreover, the two rendering back-ends of the chip sport four color ROPs, for a total of eight.
| AMD FirePro V3900 | AMD Radeon HD 6570 | Nvidia Quadro 400 | Nvidia Quadro 600 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stream Processors | 480 (96 5D) | 480 (96 5D) | 48 (1D) | 96 (1D) |
| ROPs | 8 | 8 | 4 | 8 |
| GPU Clock | 650 MHz | 650 MHz | 450 MHz | 640 MHz |
| Memory Clock | 900 MHz | 800 MHz | 770 MHz | 800 MHz |
| Interface | 128-bit | 128-bit | 64-bit | 128-bit |
| Memory Bandwidth | 28.8 GB/s | 28.8 GB/s | 12.3 GB/s | 25.6 GB/s |
| Video Memory Size | 1 GB GDDR3 | 1 GB GDDR3 | 512 MB GDDR3 | 1 GB GDDR3 |
| Shader Model | 5.0 | 5.0 | 4.0 | 4.0 |
| TDP | approx. 50 W | approx. 50 W | approx. 32 W | approx. 40 W |
| Street Price | $110 | $50 | $95 | $145 |
On paper, the V3900's smaller Turks chip looks more impressive than the GT216 on Nvidia's Quadro 400. It even looks a little better than the GF108 on the Quadro 600. We'll test to see if this translates into the performance of real-world tasks.
Also, it's no secret that the higher performance of workstation cards versus their gamer-oriented brethren in professional applications is mostly a result of optimized drivers. So, a comparison with the FirePro's desktop equivalent is particularly apropos as well.
- Meet AMD's FirePro V3900
- Can We Turn A Radeon HD 6570 Into A FirePro V3900?
- Test System And Benchmarks
- Benchmark Results: EnSight
- Benchmark Results: Catia
- Benchmark Results: LightWave
- Benchmark Results: Maya
- Benchmark Results: Pro/ENGINEER
- Benchmark Results: SolidWorks
- Benchmark Results: Siemens Teamcenter Visualization Mockup
- Benchmark Results: Siemens NX
- Power Consumption And Noise
- FirePro V3900: Faster Than Quadro, Still Entry-Level



Just curious
CAD apps like AutoCAD had Optimized code to run better on Professional Video Cards because the Optimized code in the Drivers.. Unlike Gaming Video Cards which has Optimized codes for Games but not on this CAD apps..
Just for the heck of it, and also to answer the question:
- Which card is the better choice for my work station if I'd also like to run a game or two during the lunch break?
This travesty needs to stop.
I'd especially like to see some benchmarks on mid-range pro cards.
Also, same question as above, can I use a Profession CAD graphics card along side a gaming card and get CAD benefits on one monitor and gaming on the other.
Unless your motherboard supports PCI Express slot switch off via software you can't. Even if it would, you would need to restart. Plus knowing AMD driver compatibility and reliability I wouldn't even hope atm. If you are gaming a lot and doing a lot of 3D, question is, what is more important to you, games or 3D content creation? If you are just beginner and doing CAD for fun, you will get by with gaming GPU. Otherwise, you must be making money on your projects and you should afford mid-high GPU for CAD.
Holly cow, you weren't kidding when you said 'Entry Level', this is more like 'Impoverished Level.'
To me an entry level are sub-$400 cards; nVidia Quadro 2000 series and AMD FirePro v5800. Obviously, Pro GPU's are tailored for their use.
Key word is support. Try to reach support with your 7 series GPU and then try the same when you are professional CAD user with CAD dedicated FirePro.
Blender is a free tool. Hardly AMD would be spending money to optimise for freeware.
its not about optimization for a free tool.. the cost of the tool isn't relevant. it is probably the most used tool in the graphical modelling/rendering world. hence a benchmark would be nice. Like i said, not everyone is build 3d engineering schematics with CAD.
Blender may well be a free tool, but it is amazingly powerful and many large companies use it with their own UI and plugins for very large projects. It is used from everything from movies to video game design, and it would be very nice to see how it stacks up.
Still, if you are making any amount of money doing this kind of work I am pretty sure you would be spending a minimum of $250 on your card, and likely somewhere in the $500-1000 range because it is the bottleneck of your productivity and the main determining factor on how many projects a person can do in a year.
Lastly, I would love to see how this card scales on different hardware to see how much was the $100 GPU, vs how much was due to running a duel CPU setup