AMD FirePro V8800 2GB
Our FirePro V8800 2GB workstation graphics card testing was carried out under Ubuntu 9.10 (64-bit) with the Linux 2.6.31 kernel, GNOME 2.28.1 desktop, and X.Org Server 1.6.4. The latest official ATI workstation Linux driver (fglrx 8.71) that was released in March with Eyefinity support and many performance improvements should work just fine with the FirePro V8800 graphics card. For our testing, however, we ended up going with a press Linux driver that was labeled fglrx 8.73.3 and an OpenGL version string of 4.0.9833. The OpenGL version string for the older graphics cards used in this comparison was 3.3.9833.
Once the proprietary Linux driver was setup, everything ran just fine. However, getting to the point of installing AMD's official workstation driver was the troubling part. When initially booting the Ubuntu 9.10 LiveCD the display would turn black when the X.Org Server was started. An Ubuntu 10.04 LTS development snapshot was then tested out, which uses the ATI kernel mode-setting support by default, and again we could not successfully get the X.Org Server running with the V8800. This was when using the FirePro V8800 with the included DisplayPort to DVI adapter. We ended up swapping out the FirePro V8800 for a Radeon graphics card to first install Ubuntu 9.10 and then installed the proprietary driver. Once that was done, we could toss in the FirePro V8800 and everything was working fine. Another word of caution is that the included DisplayPort to DVI adapter does not support 2560 x 1600 dual-link DVI displays. Initially we were going to test this graphics card with such a display, but the adapter will not support that and just mode-set to a maximum 1280 x 800 resolution.
Again, the proprietary Linux driver does support all of the standard ATI workstation features like Eyefinity, Quad Buffer Stereo, and synchronization using an ATI FirePro S400 module.
The rest of the hardware in our test system setup included two AMD Opteron 2384 quad-core "Shanghai" processors, a Tyan Thunder n3600M motherboard, a SilverStone Decathlon 800W power supply, 4GB of DDR2 ECC Registered memory, and a 160GB Western Digital WD1600YS-01S SATA hard drive. For seeing how the FirePro V8800 runs under Linux, we compared its performance to the earlier FireGL V8600 1GB, FirePro V8700 1GB, and FirePro V8750 2GB graphics cards. Just for kicks, we threw in the consumer-grade ATI Radeon HD 5770 graphics card too. The Radeon HD 5770 1GB is based off of the Juniper GPU and not the Cypress GPU found in the Radeon HD 5870 for which the V8800 is based, but we had to deal with the hardware we had available.
For the Linux benchmarking we ran the industry-standard SPECViewPerf 10 test profile with the ensight-03, maya-02, catia-02, and tcvis-01 tests. While not directly workstation related, as the Unigine engine is the most demanding OpenGL benchmark available on Linux at this point, we also ran Unigine Heaven with this selection of graphics cards. Similarly, the slightly less demanding Unigine Tropics test was added too. All of this benchmarking was controlled through the Phoronix Test Suite.