Meet AMD's FirePro V3900
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.
| Header Cell - Column 0 | 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.
