CADCAMNet Review - ATI’s New ATI FireGL V5000

February 17, 2005
CADCAMNet

After a flood of new graphics accelerators last summer with the first shipments of systems supporting the new PCI-Express graphics standard things quieted down a bit. But the graphics market has started heating up again. ATI used SolidWorks World as the venue to introduce its new ATI FireGL™ V5000 workstation graphics accelerator; a board positioned right in the middle of the company’s Visualization series and aimed directly at the sweet spot for midrange CAD applications.

The ATI FireGL™ V5000 has a manufacturer’s suggested retail price of $699, but we’ve already seen it offered at $500 or less. The new board provides a number of features that have previously been available only in much higher-end graphics accelerators. Although the ATI FireGL™ V5000 provides fewer pixel pipelines than ATI’s higher-end cards (8 in the ATI FireGL™ V5000 versus 16 in the ATI FireGL™ V7100 and 12 in the ATI FireGL™ V5100), it includes the same number of geometry engines as those graphics accelerators—six versus the two provided in the ATI FireGL™ V3100 and ATI FireGL™ V3200.

The native PCI Express x16 lane architecture ATI FireGL™ V5000 uses a single-chip design that delivers full bandwidth in both upstream and downstream directions, doubling the performance capabilities of previous generation products. ATI includes two DVI-I connectors and 128MB of GDDR3 unified graphics memory, enabling the board to drive two analog or digital monitors at up to 2048x1536 pixel resolution in 32-bit color. But ATI goes a step further by including dual link support for ultrahigh resolution displays, making the ATI FireGL™ V5000 the first mid-range graphics accelerator to support these 9 megapixel displays at up to 3840x2400 resolution. The ATI FireGL™ V5000 also includes a stereoscopic 3D connector with quadbuffered support.

The ATI FireGL™ V5000 is designed to accelerate 3D workstation applications based on OpenGL and Microsoft DirectX 9.0 and is certified with all the leading 3D applications such as CATIA, SolidWorks, Alias StudioTools, and others.

Unlike the two more expensive PCI Express ATI boards, the ATI FireGL™ V5000 uses a 128-bit memory interface, yielding a memory bandwidth of 13.6 GB/second. ATI rates the card’s graphics performance at 637 million vertices per second and 3.4 billion pixels per second.

In our own independent testing, the ATI FireGL™ V5000 performed significantly better than the lower-priced ATI FireGL™ V3200. In fact, its SPECviewperf scores came very close to the more expensive ATI FireGL™ V5100. The ATI FireGL™ V5000 surpassed the benchmark performance of the more expensive NVIDIA Quadro FX 1300. In two of the most representative benchmark tests—those measuring graphic performance when manipulating models produced in Pro/E and Unigraphics—the ATI FireGL™ V5000 scored 47.09 and 43.41 respectively, compared to 37.7 and 38.5 for the FX 1300.

While there are now many PCI Express graphics boards to choose from, ATI appears to be delivering more bang for the buck. Those users willing to pay for the ultimate performance— particularly those doing high-end visualization and analysis—will still look to NVIDIA and 3Dlabs. But for most midrange CAD applications, the accelerators from ATI appear to be the winners. In particular, with a street price at or just below $500, the new ATI FireGL™ V5000 looks like the board to beat.