AMD FirePro V8750 2GB

We reviewed the FirePro V8700 1GB workstation graphics card back in March, but AMD has now introduced its evolutionary successor to this ultra high-end product, and that is the ATI FirePro V8750 2GB. The FirePro V8750 continues to be based off the ATI RV770 graphics processor, but is now backed by 2GB of 900MHz GDDR5 memory. Bumping the memory speed by 50MHz has raised the peak memory bandwidth from 108GB/s to 115GB/s. How well though does this $1,800 USD graphics card work with Linux? Well, we have all of the benchmarks in this article.

The FirePro V8750 is designed to be an ultra high-end workstation graphics card for tasks like digital content creation, computer aided design, and scientific modeling. Being based off the RV770 and just being a six-month refresh to the earlier FirePro V8700, a majority of the features between these two cards are the same. The RV770 is a 55nm part (compared to 40nm with their newer GPUs like the Radeon HD 4770), a 750MHz core clock, 800 Stream processors, OpenGL 3.0 support, a 256-bit memory controller, and PCI Express 2.0 support. Being a workstation part, there is also a Stereoscopic output and the graphics card is Genlock/Framelock compatible. The big difference between the V8700 and V8750 is the doubling of the video RAM and this GDDR5 memory running slightly faster and thus with greater memory bandwidth.

Another big announcement that was timed with the release of the FirePro V8750 launch was the introduction of CrossFire Pro. CrossFire was originally introduced back in 2005 and then as CrossFire X in 2007. While earlier workstation graphics cards have physically had a compatible multi-GPU connector onboard, up until now this technology was only supported with ATI's consumer hardware. CrossFire Pro brings this multi-GPU rendering support (using an Alternate Frame Rendering mode) to the FirePro graphics cards for workstation use. NVIDIA has long supported SLI both on their consumer and workstation graphics cards, but AMD is finally joining the party when it comes to improving their multi-GPU rendering capabilities on the workstation front.

CrossFire X allows up to four ATI GPUs to be paired together (on Windows), but for now only two FirePro graphics cards can be bridged together. CrossFire Pro is just not compatible with the just-launched V8750, but it will also work with the ATI FirePro V5700, V7750, and V8700 graphics cards too. CrossFire Pro does not allow the mixing and matching of different workstation GPUs, so the two ATI graphics cards must be identical for this support. Currently the CrossFire Pro support is just available with the Windows Catalyst drivers, but it is coming to Linux this year.