ATI FireGL V7300 and V7350
The FireGL Visualisation series of products are PCI Express only, ATI using their formidable range of native PCIe GPUs to create workstation class products. The V7100 shared the same technology base as their desktop R480 product, and with the release in October 2005 of R520, there's no prize for guessing what powers the V73xx products."Why not R580, though?", I hear you ask. The answer is a simple one. Most workstation apps are so tied up on the CPU or in the graphics hardware's vertex units, that the pixel shader hardware rarely gets a workout. Of course there's the odd workstation-class application that'll happily soak up fragment horsepower, but they're still the exception.
So the Workstation Products Division had no need to secure R580 production for the new FireGL hardware, since R520 shares the former chip's ability when vertex processing.
With the technology base set, WPD forked two SKUs from the base, creating FireGL V7300 and V7350. Here's how they stack up.
FireGL V7300 and V7350 Specification
| FireGL V7300 and V7350 Specification versus ATI FireGL V7100 and NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SKU / Spec | FireGL V7300 | FireGL V7350 | FireGL V7100 | Quadro FX 4500 |
| Vertex Units | 8 | 6 | 8 | |
| Fragment Units | 16 | 16 | 24 | |
| Texture Units | 16 | 16 | 24 | |
| Framebuffer Size | 512MiB | 1024MiB | 256MiB | 512MiB |
| Memory Bus | 256-bit (512-bit internal) | 256-bit | 256-bit | |
| Outputs | 2 x dual-link DVI-I | 1 x dual-link DVI-I 1 x single-link DVI-I |
2 x dual-link DVI-I | |
| Geometry Clock | 600MHz | 500MHz | 470MHz | |
| Fragment Clock | 600MHz | 500MHz | 430MHz | |
| Memory Clock | 650MHz | 500MHz | 525MHz | |
| Geometry Rate | 1.20Gtris/sec | 0.75Gtris/sec | 0.94Gtris/sec | |
| Fragment MADD Rate | 9.6Ginst/sec | 8.0Ginst/sec | 20.64Ginst/sec | |
| Genlock/Framelock | Yes | No | Yes (G-Sync) | |
| Multi-GPU acceleration | No | No | Yes (SLI) | |
Yes, the V7350 really does have a 1024MiB/1GiB framebuffer. While it's technically not the first workstation board to carry that memory size, ATI and NVIDIA both shipping 1 and 2GiB one-off boards to select customers, it's the first freely available single graphics board with such a large framebuffer (unless someone sneaked one past my beady eyes and apologies if they have).
The V73xx boards up their vertex processing rate to class-leading levels, clocking the full 8-unit VS collection at 600MHz. The hardware supports OpenGL 2.0 and DirectX Shader Model 3.0 (with D3D making inroads into the workstation application space) as the desktop R520 does and the board provides a pair of dual-link DVI-I outputs.
For the first time on a FireGL product, V7300 and V7350 gain Genlock support for film applications. Genlock syncs frame output from the graphics board to the output source or a master clock for a full suite of hardware. So FireGL instantly becomes more attractive to the film and TV industries.
While FireGL won't be certified for multi-GPU acceleration as Quadro is with SLI, multiple FireGL V73xx cards can be used in a single system for multi-head output or singular multi-board acceleration (where they work separately) where the apps are there to support it.
