SINGAPORE: Graphics chip-maker ATI has launched its new FirePro brand, replacing the old FireGL and FireNV, signifying a fresh start for the ATI professional line-up with a complete re-write of software drivers and much more frequent updates.
Speaking at Siggraph Asia 2008 in Singapore, ATI's director of product marketing Bahman Dara, said the move was one of the fruits of the AMD-ATI merger.
FirePro is ATI's professional brand, whereas Radeon is aimed at consumers. While Radeon is about games and video editing, FirePro is about CAD, digital content creation, oil, gas and medical imaging. A major difference is certification. Every CPU, OS, software platform combination has to be certified by the likes of Autodesk and Solidworks which adds up to a pretty large combination.
Professional also means different things. At one end, FirePro has passively cooled cards aimed at the financial market segment, which needs multiple screens for stock market charts and data. At the other end, there are 200 watt cards with 2GB of RAM for the highest possible 3D performance.
Dara claims that the latest generation of cards are consistently at least 10 percent faster than the only other player in the market using the ViewPerf benchmark.
One new technology is the vertex buffer object. In layman's terms, this means intelligently pre-loading data into the graphics card's memory and anticipating the polygons that will be shown, depending on the direction an object is turning, for instance. This alone can boost 3D performance up to 10 times.
The medical industry in particular is leading the adoption of 30-bit color for imaging--30-bit color means a far greater dynamic range, going from 16.7 million colors to over 2.5 billion. This is especially relevant when looking at X-rays searching for tumours and other anomalies. Dara said that HP now has a range of 30-bit Dreamcolor monitors and ATI's FirePro 7700 card is its to be 30-bit capable, and has a new Displayport interface to carry the added data.
The industry's appetite for higher resolutions continues with new monitors now reaching 4,000 lines of vertical resolution. This trend is continuing without any sign of abating with new LCD technologies, but traditional phosphor can't support such high resolutions.
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