Early Performance and Thoughts
We're currently working on a full performance evaluation of the V7350, versus Quadro FX 4500. While that's still a significant work in progress, as we lay down a testing foundation to serve graphics workstation analysis properly, there's still some performance data to share.The V7350 is all about the 1GiB framebuffer, so I engineered a set of tests to stress vertex processing speed with multiple large meshes (as sorted and indexed vertex buffers, locked in card memory). A simple 10 instruction vertex shader was used to process vertices with basic LOD, and a smaller buffer was updated after processing just to lightly stress writes.
As expected, the 1GiB framebuffer on the V7350 means significantly higher performance than a card with half the memory space. It sounds obvious, and it is, but the only reason to consider a V7350 is if you profile your memory usage (system and VGA) and find you're consistently hitting memory pressure limits on a smaller framebuffer board.
The asking price demands that analysis, and our early testing shows that when the application is sensible and not essentially crapping all over card memory with poorly indexed and/or sorted meshes, 1GiB is a sizeable performance win.
Fragment processing rate was measured at peak for the clock rate in both OpenGL and Direct3D, indicating that the first revision of the driver for FireGL V7350 is doing the right thing. In short, it seems like the hardware to have should you want a large framebuffer.
Early Thoughts
With the genlock hardware not available until the second half of this year, uptake for the V7350 is initially going to lie in the 3D modelling and CAD/CAM markets. And for those that absolutely need the framebuffer space, it initially seems worth it.There's no publically available Windows or Linux driver for the V7350 at the time of writing, but if you secure one from your preferred vendor or ATI directly, they'll be able to supply what you need.
Look out for our in-depth analysis of the ATI FireGL V7350 at a later date. And if you're short of things to do today, let it catalyse you thinking about 1GiB consumer boards, just for giggles....
