Driver and Support for FireGL Workstation Products
ATI's FireGL driver doesn't follow the public CATALYST montly release pattern for Radeon products. Instead, since the driver is required to be certified for all manner of professional applications, the release rate is much steadier. The argument that development houses, film studios and the other users of FireGL products can't afford to update their drivers on such a regular basis rings somewhat true.Instead, when a significant fix or update is made to a FireGL driver for a certain application, that fix is rolled out to just the customers that need it urgently, with the fix or change rolled in to the cycle of releases that takes in a significant amount of certification work and testing for a larger portfolio of supported apps.
Support for FireGL products is also paramount. The work being done on them begets strong support from the IHV for both hardware and software. Downtime is a no-no for most users, reboots cost significant amounts of money, blue screens don't give an IT manager confidence in a future purchase. The reasons are many.
Dinesh was keen to emphasise those points to HEXUS during the FireGL's product launch just before CeBIT. He mentions that the hardware side of things largely takes care of itself. The chip design team responsible for R520 had FireGL considerations in mind from day one (and always have had, which you can see across the entire Radeon range if you know where to look). That gives Dinesh and his team extra room to work on support and the driver.
In terms of the OpenGL driver, they still maintain a different source tree to the Radeon desktop guys, slowly but surely increasing its performance, reliability and compatibility.
Dinesh is open about the fact it's historically been one of the weaker links in a FireGL package. The famed OpenGL rewrite applies to both business units, but it'll happen for FireGL only when it's absolutely ready.
The cry of "it's just a £2000 Radeon/GeForce!" shows a lack of understanding about how the pro space works. You get much the same hardware (bar the genlock additions, or extra chips for multi-head, etc), but the extra money goes into assurance that things work in a predictable and solid manner, without any major issue.
While this is a FireGL piece, it's worth noting that the same applies to NVIDIA and Quadro. It's then the value for that money that's assessable, and it's what we'll endeavour to explore as time goes by in future pieces.
The current beta driver (eek!) for FireGL is named 8.223-060207a3-031009C-PreWHQL-RT-32-ATI and worked flawlessly (literally) as far as stability went. App profiles for supported apps worked (and worked well in terms of feature enabling and performance increases) and it's only further performance that seemingly needs to be ironed out for a future release.
The driver uses a caps-based system for application support, reducing some of the specific application paths needed in the driver. We'll cover the driver a bit more in a full evaluation of the hardware very soon.
