AMD FirePro V7900

With the Unigine Heaven test, at least the FirePro V7900 came in front of the FirePro V7800, but was only about 10% faster. There is likely some driver regression for the Cayman workstation hardware affecting the Unigine OpenGL engine performance that will hopefully be worked out in the coming releases.

The FirePro V7900 is set to begin selling today at a price of $999 USD. The price for this high-end FirePro workstation graphics card may seem a bit steep seeing as the FirePro V7800 is retailing right now for just about $630 USD, but the V7900 is a big upgrade over its predecessor. The FirePro V7900 was able to successfully outperform the FirePro V8800 in our Linux OpenGL tests (sans the Unigine regression) with that ultra high-end card having a retail price-tag of $1160. Of course, we would anticipate a Cayman-based FirePro V8900 ultra high-end will likely be released in the near future that will trump the V7900 performance, but of course will likely be priced somewhere well above $999.

Besides the FirePro V7900 being a big performance upgrade over the FirePro V7800, this new professional workstation graphics card also has to its advantage four DisplayPort 1.2 connectors, Stereo 3D, PCI Express 2.1, AMD PowerTune, GeometryBoost technology, and other new and enhanced features.

We will likely have more Linux tests of the AMD FirePro V5900 and V7900 in the near future (we just received these samples from AMD late on Friday afternoon). We could also end up seeing the FirePro V5900/V7900 hardware become even faster with future driver releases, just as had happened when receiving major driver optimizations last year, but it ended up being just regression fixes.