AMD launch new FireGL products based on R600 and RV630

Monday 06th August 2007, 03:03:00 PM, written by Rys

AMD have announced new FireGL workstation graphics products at SIGGRAPH today, based on their R600 and RV630 ASICs currently used in desktop graphics products.

Supporting DirectX 10 and OpenGL 2.1, AMD see these replacements for the outgoing FireGL product line, based on R520 at the top end, as bringing much improved performance and features for the market they intend to address.

Based on a GPU we've come to know in recent months, the top end new FireGL V8650 sports a 2GiB framebuffer -- a first for readily-available professional acceleration -- connected to R600 at 700MHz, with all the display connectivity and features we've come to expect from products powered by that GPU. There's no word if it's a full R600, but it's likely that's the case, with all the sampling, shading and ROP abilities of its desktop counterpart at similar frequency.

The V8600 has the same outward configuration with half the memory. The V7600 is a new configuration of R600 however, codenamed R600 PRO. Specifications show it having the same shading power per clock as R600 XTX, but with half the external memory bus width at 256-bit. No word on whether any other functionality is cut down, but we're assuming it's otherwise intact.

V3600 and V5600 come based on RV630 PRO and RV630 XTX respectively, with the differences between them coming in terms of framebuffer size (256MiB for the V3600, 512MiB for the V5600) and the speeds of the GPU and memory (V5600 significantly faster in both areas compared to the V3600).

You can get the details in the AMD FireGL Product Matrix.

On top of the core hardware specifications you'll see support for dual dual-link DVI outputs across the board, HD component output on certain models, and native 10-bit per channel display output.

AMD has also created a new technology it lovingly calls AutoDetect, which appears to be per-application GPU profiles which can switch on the fly at runtime without any user intervention, seemingly based on which application is in the foreground. That lets users run multiple profiled professional apps with the right profile characteristics applied.

Apps and ISVs like Autodesk 3ds Max and Maya, SOFTIMAGE|XSI and Solidworks are all mentioned in the AMD press release. The products are set to ship next month, and we'll have in-depth reviews of most of the new stack in due course.

It looks like NVIDIA finally have something to worry about, at least in the high- and ultra-high end professional spaces!

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Tagging

amd ± firegl, R600, RV630, 2GiB, V8650

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