AMD FirePro V8700 1GB

[numasan]

Just to clarify, the FireGL boards I have experience with, were from 2006-2007 (the series number escaped me). Surely you didn't use IBM GPU's then? But the codebase was the same? What you did with the new OpenGL driver and the new GPU architecture, was to reboot your whole effort in the workstation area. Frankly, you should have done this as soon as you changed from IBM to your own design. Now you face the troubles of convincing DCC users that this time you really mean it! We are in 2009 now, this situation should be a non issue, not a potential risk.

I think I will buy an RV7xx now (not FirePro yet), in a couple of months, to see if things are really better. Personally I think you should concentrate all your efforts into the open source driver, make it the best OpenGL performer out there with Linux stability. I don't care about DRM (nobody I know in the VFX business cares about digital restriction management. We make graphics, we don't deliver it). I just want to take advantage of the awesome hardware you made. I will give it a shot until the end of this year. If it is not better than Nvidia by then, I'm afraid the boat has sailed...

[Kano]

@bridgman

Why is CF not supported with FirePro? At least not in Win and Linux tests only crashed the system using 2x FirePro V7750.

[bridgman]

I don't know for sure, but my guess is that the benefit is much less with workstation-type apps. Consumer apps tend to be pixel-shader limited (so multiple cards can make a big difference even if the vertex processing is duplicated) but workstation apps are as likely to be vertex-shader limited and current multi-GPU implementations (ours or competitors) wouldn't help much there.

For workstation use there seemed to be more interest in things like frame-lock than Crossfire.

I re-read Michael's article and didn't see anything about crashes with >1 card in the system; is that from another test ?

[Kano]

Some workstation users want to play a game too...

[bridgman]

Sure, but it seems unlikely that they would buy a second workstation card just so they could use Crossfire for gaming, if there wasn't also a benefit from the second card on workstation apps.

[Kano]

It is highly unlikely you will see an increase with specviewperf benchmarks using 2 then... But what if you have got already 2 of em?

[grantek]

Put them in 2 workstations and get double the work done?

[Darkfire Fox]

Is there any sort of roadmap available for a FOSS Ati Firepro driver, or does AMD need to release the documentation yet?

[gennaro]

So, did you test it then?
I'm willing to buy a Dell Precision, and for my budget the chanches are:

1. M6400, with a Core Duo processor and a QuadroFX 2700 or
2. M6500, with an i7 processor and a firepro M7740.

There is no way to have the i7 + quadro
same price (around 1500 euro +vat, next model is 400 euro out of budget)
I want to use blender under linux, and I'nm afraid to get in trouble with ati, even if on their site there are the drivers for Ubuntu.
Thank you for any advice.

[BlackStar]

I am using Blender on Linux with an Ati 4850 card and there are no significant issues to speak of. There used to be a bug when using Blender under Compiz, where the Gnome toolbars would disappear (you could still click them), but this to be fixed now.

In short, Blender seems to work fine on both my Nvidia Quadro laptop and my (much more powerful) Ati desktop.