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	CGSociety: Product Review Joseph Tan, 8 November 2005

We take a look at ATI's latest workstation graphics products: the high-end FireGL V7100 and the mid-range FireGL V5000. Both products are commonly found in workstations from major vendors such as Alienware, BOXX, HP, Dell, and IBM. The ATI FireGL line competes against 3DLabs' Wildcat Realizm and NVIDIA's Quadro line of workstation graphics products.

ATI's Fire GL products are now based on the company's Radeon products, and provide some additional features over standard Radeons:

User defined clip planes
User defined overlay planes
Point and line antialiasing
Two-sided lighting

The above features can greatly accelerate certain workstation applications. For example applications that view cut-out objects benefit greatly with the help of hardware clip-plane acceleration.

The following features are also found on the FireGL line, and are common features for workstation graphics:

Dual DVI-I output. One is dual-link capable.
3D stereo output
Broad ISV (Independent Software Vendor) certification

The basic figures on the two products are shown right:

The table shows that the Fire GL V7100 and the Fire GL V5000 have similar feature sets and core clock speeds. Interestingly both products have the same numbers of vertex shaders. The FireGL V7100 features twice the number of pixel shading engines (with correspondingly twice the memory bandwidth). This gives the FireGL V7100 a fillrate advantage over the FireGL V5000.

	ATI Fire GL V5000	ATI Fire GL V7100
Price (MSRP)	US$699	US$1099
Vertex shder model	2.0	2.0
No. vertex shaders	6	6
Pixel shader model	2.0+	2.0+
No. pixel/fragment shaders	8	16
Core clock rate	425 MHz	493 Mhz
Memory clock rate	432 MHz	475 Mhz
Main memory	128 MB GDDR3	256 MB GDDR3
Memory interface width	128-bit	256-bit
Video output	2x DVI-I (one dual-link capable)	2x DVI-I (one dual-link capable)
Max resolution	2048x1536 (analog display) 3840 x 2400 (dual link on second DVI connector)	2048x1536 (analog display) 3840 x 2400 (dual link on second DVI connector)
Stereo output	Yes	Yes
Bus interface	PCI Express 16x	PCI Express 16x

The FireGL V7100 and V5000 Boards

The FireGL V7100 requires the use of auxiliary power via a power splitter cable, common for high-speed graphics cards. Even with the higher power budgets of the PCI Express interface slot, additional power support is mandatory. The board features a large cooling apparatus that does its job, producing little noticeable audible noise. The printed circuit board (PCB) is only half-populated with memory chips, the FireGL V7100 could have accommodated 512MB of GDDR3 memory.

The video outputs are two DVI-I (one dual-link capable), as well as a 3-pin stereo output for shutter glasses. The dual-link DVI connector is shown below as the left-most connector.

A tiny dip switch resides on the back of the board. It's covered up and undocumented, so peril awaits the curious user

The V5000 is also a PCI Express board, slightly shorter and receives all of its power through the PCI-E connector. With less power consumption the result is a smaller cooling assembly. The FireGL V5000 revs the fan hard during boot up. Similar to the V7100, only half the memory chips are loaded which seems to indicate that a 256MB version of the FireGL V5000 is possible.

The video outputs are two DVI-I (one dual-link capable), as well as a 3-pin stereo output for shutter glasses. Shown below the left most DVI output is dual-link capable.

ATI offers little more than the essential video controls for the two FireGL boards. This is fine for most users as they would want to set everything up and leave everything as-is. ATI's Hydravision provides valuable multi-monitor support and this worked well.

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Benchmarks
For our benchmark runs,
the Alienware MJ-12 7550a was used.

	Vendor	Alienware
	Machine	MJ-12 7550a Workstation
	CPU	Dual Opteron 275 (2.2GHz, 1MB L2 cache, dual-core)
	Motherboard and chipset	TYAN Thunder K8WE S2895 NVIDIA nForce Professional 2200/2050
	Memory	Dual channel 2GB (DDR400, buffered, ECC)

To get some idea of a comparative test, the Fire GL V7100 and V500 were tested with an NVIDIA Quadro FX 1400. The Quadro FX 1400 was chosen as it had a MSRP in between the FireGL V5000 and the FireGL V7100.

	Product	Quadro FX 1400
	Price (MSRP)	US$799
	Vertex shader model	3.0
	No. vertex shaders	5
	Pixel shader model	3.0
	Pixel/fragment shaders	8
	Core clock rate	350MHz
	Memory clock rate	300MHz
	Main memory	128MB DDR
	Memory interface width	256-bit
	Video output	2x DVI-1 (none dual-link capable)
	Stereo output	Yes

The NVIDIA Quadro FX 1400 features fewer vertex shading engines operating at a lower clock rate than either the ATI FireGL V5000 or V7100. The Quadro FX 1400 is also not dual-link capable which makes it unsuitable for those lucky ones with a 30-inch Apple Cinema display screens running at a resolution of 2560 x 1600 pixels.

The benchmark software that were used for testing were:

SPECViewPerf 8.01
SPECapc for Maya 6.5
SPECapc for 3ds Max 7
CineBench 2003

Optimized 3ds max drivers from the vendors were used for the SPECapc for 3ds Max 7 test. Driver settings were set to "Speed".

		Software settings
	OS	Windows XP SP2 (32-bit)
	Video Driver	ATI FireGL 8.163.1 NVIDIA Forceware 77.56 ATI Fire GL MAXimum v.2.0.5284 NVIDIA MAXtreme v. 7.00.03
	DirectX	9.0c
	Screen resolution	1280x1024 pixels 32-BPP Vertical sync off

SPECViewperf 8.01 Overall result (Higher is better)
		ATI Fire GL V5000	ATI Fire GL V7100	NVIDIA Quadro FX 1400
	3dsmax-03	30.33	31.83	34.25
	catia-01	22.73	23.26	29.15
	ensight-01	24.41	29.62	18.56
	light-07	17.33	17.26	24.20
	maya-01	41.40	41.44	56.62
	proe-03	43.72	44.62	49.58
	sw-01	24.83	26.62	22.42
	ugs-04	26.68	31.94	28.48

SPECViewPerf
Both the Fire GL V7100 and V5000 performed very similarly. The Fire GL V7100 scores marginally higher than the Fire GL V5000. We expected more of a difference considering the FireGL V7100's higher memory bandwidth, higher clock speed, and larger number of rasterizing hardware over the FireGL V5000. The Quadro FX 1400 managed to stay ahead in some of the tests, a surprising result given that the hardware should be less powerful.

SPECapc for 3ds Max 7
Shown above are the total test times in seconds, the complete test results are provided by the link above. The Fire GL V7100 finished the test in slightly less time than the V5000. Surprisingly the V7100 wasn't significantly faster than its smaller sibling. The Quadro FX 1400 finished ahead of the two boards.

SPECapc for 3ds Max 7 Total Test Time - seconds (Lower is better)
ATI Fire GL V5000	ATI Fire GL V7100	NVIDIA Quadro FX 1400
2184	2171	1877

CineBench 2003 (Higher is better)
		ATI Fire GL V5000	ATI Fire GL V7100	NVIDIA Quadro FX 1400
	Rendering (Single CPU)	314
	Rendering (Multiple CPU)	1009
	Multiprocessor Speedup:	3.21x
	Shading (CINEMA 4D)	371	369	370
	Shading (OpenGL Software Lighting)	1650	1650	1609
	Shading (OpenGL Hardware Lighting)	3296	3421	3788
	OpenGL Speedup	8.87	9.26	10.22

CineBench 2003
CineBench runs its test in software and with full graphics hardware acceleration, showing the much greater efficiency of using the graphics hardware acceleration. The results show that both the V7100 and V5000 performed similarly, the Fire GL V71000 again was only barely faster than the V5000. The Quadro FX 1400 pulled ahead by around 10% of the Fire GL V7100, a marginally better result.

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Conclusion

Curious as to why the Fire GL V7100 didn't pull ahead of the Fire GL V5000. Both products have the same number of vertex shading engines and had core clock rates 16% of each other. It would seem the workstation benchmarks stressed geometry performance over fillrate, which would explain why the FireGL V7100 and V5000 performed so similar. The Quadro FX 1400 should have been the slowest performer of the bunch but surprisingly managed to pull ahead slightly most of the tests.

Running a game-oriented benchmark such as 3DMark 2005 showed a different story as the FireGL V7100's fillrate capabilities definitely outperformed the FireGLV5000 and the Quadro FX 1400. 3DMark reported a multi-texturing fillrate of 7800 MTexel/sec versus the FireGL V5000's 3400 MTexel/sec and the Quadro FX 1400's 2800 MTexel/sec, this made a huge difference in gaming applications. The FireGL V7100 does contain twice as much onboard memory that is good for 3D applications with large data sets.

The Quadro FX 1400 performed very well, leading the pack for most of the tests. The similar performing Fire GL V5000 was the best bang for buck (less than US$400 on Pricewatch) and featured dual-link DVI capability. The Fire GL V7100 commands about 50% more price, but scored so similar to the FireGL V5000, that it was a disappointment in the workstation tests. The FireGL V7100 had the greatest onboard memory but couldn't use it's fill rate capabilities in our benchmarks.

The tests used the latest certified drivers from the vendors. Comparing the hardware capabilities to the result, I wonder how much "optimization" work went into these particular benchmark suites.

ATI FireGL V7100 and V5000

Manufacturer:	ATI

Price:	US$1099 (FireGL V7100)
	US$699 (FireGL V5000)

Hits:

For workstation applications, the Fire GL V5000 showed the strongest price/performance.
Great image quality, no issues with stability during testing. Hydravision multi-monitor support worked well.
Three year workstation warranty and support from ATI.

Misses:

The FireGL V7100 does have more fill rate grunt, but this was of little consequence in our benchmarks.
ATI's FireGL control panel does not offer much tweaking options.

Related links:
ATI

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