AMD Launches FirePro V3900 Professional GPU
AMD has released its new entry-level V3900 professional graphics card, which replaces the V3800. The V3900 is priced at $119, which puts it directly up against the Nvidia's Quadro 400. It sits roughly $50 less than the Nvidia's Quadro 600 and $20 more than the V3800.
From the specifications, V3900 looks to be a nice update to the V3800 and is basically the business version of the Radeon HD 6570 DDR3. The V3900 has double the memory at 1GB and is based on the "Turks" GPU. The card's 128-bit DDR3 memory gives it 28.8GB/s of memory bandwidth compared to the V3800, which had a 64-bit interface providing half the bandwidth at 14.4GB/s. It supports the latest versions of OpenGL and OpenCL (4.2 and 1.1, respectively). Based on various test conducted by AMD, the card shows performance increases over both the V3800 and Quadro 400.
The card will ship with an optional full-height bracket to allow it to be installed in standard form factor systems. The AMD FirePro V3900 has received certification for a variety of applications including AutoCAD, UGS NX, PTC Creo, SolidWorks, and Autodesk 3Ds Max. It is backed by a 3-year limited product repair / replacement warranty.
Read more on the AMD V3900 professional graphics card at its product page.
I happened to work on a workstation carrying quadro fx 4800 which alone costs ~900$ and I didn't find any difference. I don't know why they are over hyped.
you obviously have not tried to work with a large scene/assembly, the difference between a pro card and a gaming card becomes very apparent when you do. Most CGI folks only spot render on the local machine, all production renderings are sent to the farm so for day to day working a pro card pays for itself, unless your just working on small stuff, at which point whats the worth of using Maya/Max......
Good thing you were here to make sure someone had said it within the first three posts.
I'm not a pro, however, my opinion on this is that unless you are doing serious work in the pro field, pro cards have little value over consumer cards. Even if you are not a pro, one solution to rendering large models is to take a hike while it renders.
You're easily amused.
Same here... What do you mean its slower than the Radeon 7990, its a Pro card isnt it?
I could see this being quite useful for entry level Hyper-V with RemoteFX as i paid a bit more for a v4800 and v5800 in a couple of situations and it definitely helped virtualized performance/end user experience
Actually I have worked on large(as heavy as few hundreds of MBs and sims of multiple of TB) scenarios and still I couldn't find that much of the difference.
I agree that with pro cards textures look more accurate in hardware view. But then it doesn't bring much to the table. It doesn't accelerate rest of the things. For Maya, max except rendering rest of the tools are single or double threaded.
Seriously autodesk need to get their a$$es kicked.
Some other applications like Vray, Houdini deliberately use graphics cards for specific use. But they score more
with gaming cards as they do have more CUDA/stream cores than pro cards. Here more means performance escalation in 3-4 folds. If I have 590 I get get 4x more performance than qaudro fx 5800 and still save my limbs.
You amused me...
An entry level Quadro 600 costs $150-170 and works perfect so there is no excuse to use an expensive $400-600 gaming card for professional applications and you can use both (Pro & gaming cards on W7) on the same machine. This is what I am doing and also my experience over 2-3 years.
If you see no difference with a Quadro is because you need to adjust the settings on the Nvidia control panel. Also Nvidia develops special drivers for every major Pro app so please don't say there is no difference with all that dedicated engineering and programing going on.
Jecastej, I've heard similar remarks from a few people (BoostAbuse, a few other professionals in the industry) about the pro cards, but have yet to see one outperform a Geforce with the overrides enabled, in the Nvidia control panel. I've clocked most of them with Everest now, as well. Nvidia doesn't have drivers for special apps, however - you're just plain wrong there. They don't have drivers for Maya specifically, nor for Rhino, Mudbox, Silo, etc. They may have driver profiles, but that's not the same thing. Those are just override profiles you can access already in nvcpl.
The problem is that it's simply hardware locking from the driver end. The Quadros sport the exact same chips as the Geforces - but you pay the premium for better QC and also for professional-grade support and replacement should one fail. So it's justifiable if your product fails or you have problems, sure.
Maya is such a specialized app and with so many, many variables and issues with the application itself (it's my bread and butter), it's almost impossible to actually diagnose how a card will perform unless you use it, tweak it, try various drivers (the Microsoft-suggested or Nvidia-suggested or Autodesk-suggested ones are never, ever the best ones; it's always the slightly older ones).
I'm pushing 20M polys at 15fps with a GTS250 in Maya, and almost twice that with a GTX460. There's simply no reason to purchase a FireGL or Quadro at this price point for Maya. I spent a year chugging along on a 380FX and it was just pathetic; the GTS250 demolished it and was an excellent replacement, even if it is just a retooled 8800GT.