And speaking of motherboards: the FireGL X1 requires AGP 8X, but also works with the good old AGP 4X ("Pro 50," too) interface. ATi's engineers reckon that the AGP 4X Pro-50 interface of our workstation was most likely also holding the card back a little, implying that an AGP 8X workstation may well yield even higher scores.

The brand new Linux driver was one of ATi's late release candidates of the universal graphics card driver for all ATi chips. In addition to the installer, it also includes an X- front end for configuring options like the dual-head modes. A word of praise for the drivers: after de-installation, the original X11 configuration was reliably restored in our Red Hat 8.0 system - not a given, even with modern drivers.

Pure Graphics Power

The Fire GL X1's performance in 3D construction tasks is outstanding. It beats the entire line-up from the comparison in Linux Magazine (11/02) in every single test of the Viewperf Suite 7.0. Even in the older Viewperf Suite 6.1.2, Nvidia's Quadro-4 900 XGL can keep up in three of the tests.

The most dramatic performance improvements can be seen in the Design Review Viewset (DRV-07 and DRV-08) and Pro/ Engineer Viewset (proe-1). The FireGL simply leaves the entire competition in the dust, a lead that becomes all the more pronounced in the Unigraphics Viewset (ugs-01), which it races through at 20fps compared to the Quadro's 9fps. Even in the very prestigious ProCDRS Viewset (ProCDRS-03), the X1 still maintains a comfortable 60 percent lead over the fastest Nvidia card (see diagrams 1 and 2).

...And Not Even Trying

To put things in perspective - these results should be seen as something like the FireGL's "warm-up lap," and not its sprinting performance. The AGP 4X interface of our Workstation X2100 is slowing the card down, and its 2.2 GHz Pentium 4 processor is also not exactly high-end. We can only guess what performance would be like with AGP 8X and a 2.8 GHz CPU. And indeed we've heard some claims of 200fps in the ProCDRS Viewset.

Nonetheless, the FireGL X1 is not an all-arounder. In pixel and texture intensive tasks like AWadvs-04 and 3D games, the NVIDIA Quadro-4 900XGL can flex its muscle. Consequently, the Quadro-4 may be the better card for game designers and Virtual Reality modeling. Still, ATi has closed the performance gap to its rival's product considerably - the FireGL X1 is only 25 to 30 percent slower than the Quadro-4 in Parsec.