AMD fires up pro graphics cards

AMD HAS introduced a new brand for the company’s professional graphics accelerators: ATI FirePro. The frim reckons the brand reflects its “continuing and evolving commitment to the professional graphics market.”

Janet Matsuda, senior director, AMD Professional Graphics reckons, “ATI has been known for delivering value-priced solutions for CAD and DCC professionals. The product reviews over the past year have validated the fact that ATI offers outstanding application performance as well.”

ATI FirePro V5700 features 512MB of frame buffer memory, dual link DVI and Display Port connections. Its true 30-bit display engine produces more than one billion colours at any given time

Unified Video Decoder 2.0 provides full Blu-ray feature support including dual-stream and picture in a picture (PIP) capabilities, and handles decoding of various formats in the graphics processing unit (GPU), which helps free up the CPU to handle other tasks.

The ATI FirePro V3700 features 256 MB of frame buffer memory, two dual-link DVI connectors and VGA mode support on all display outlets.

Both cards deliver the industry standard support and features important to today’s CAD and DCC users, including Microsoft DirectX 10.1 and OpenGL 2.0 support, PCI Express 2.0 interface and Shader Model 4.1.

According to the Worldwide CAD Market Report 2007-08 published by Jon Peddie Research, in 2007 the installed base of CAD users grew to 5.31 million worldwide – a 20 per cent increase from 2006. The firm predicts the CAD market will continue growth through 2008, with revenues projected to grow 15 per cent to $6,025.37 million and reach $8.1 billion by 2012.

AMD will show off the cards at Siggraph 2008, August 12-14, at the Los Angeles Convention Center in California. µ