AMD FirePro V8750 2GB

While there is no CrossFire Pro support for Linux within their Catalyst driver at this time, a single CrossFire Pro V8750 2GB graphics card is compatible with the Catalyst 8.7 driver and onwards. Multiple FirePro V8750 graphics cards could also be used to drive more monitors via their MultiView support. For all of our ATI Linux testing in this article we had used a press Linux driver that was marked fglrx 8.65.3 / OpenGL 2.1.8975 FireGL. This driver had worked just fine with the FirePro V8750 on Ubuntu Linux 9.04.

Our workstation test setup consisted of dual AMD quad-core "Shanghai" Opteron 2384 processors, a Tyan Thunder n3600M motherboard, SilverStone Decathlon 800W power supply, 4GB of DDR2 Registered memory, a 160GB Western Digital WD1600YS-01S SATA drive, and the monitor in use was a 30" Samsung SyncMaster 305T. We had compared the performance of the FirePro V8750 2GB to a FirePro V8700 1GB and FireGL V8600 1GB. To make these results a bit more interesting, we also threw in a Radeon HD 4870 X2 2GB consumer-grade graphics card that was setup for CrossFire.

On the software side was Ubuntu 9.04 with the Linux 2.6.28 (x86_64) kernel, X Server 1.6.0, an EXT3 file-system, a default resolution of 2560 x 1600, and the aforementioned fglrx 8.65.3 / OpenGL 2.1.8975 FireGL Catalyst driver. The bulk of our tests were from SPECViewPerf 9 and SPECViewPerf 10. SPECViewPerf 10 on Linux/UNIX systems can be rather buggy and problematic in some situations, which is why SPECViewPerf 9 continues to still be used. We also ran VDrift just to see how this OpenGL test would handle on these workstation graphics cards. All of the testing was managed through the Phoronix Test Suite.