Performance Milestones for ATI's FirePro 3D Graphics

ATI graphics unit from Advanced Micro Devices was already announced to release its latest additions to its FirePro 3D graphics accelerators during the IBC 2008 conference in Amsterdam. The new graphics solutions are expected to deliver the fastest and most cost effective rendering for 3D CAD software, according to AMD's group, which will most likely claim performance milestones for the products. The company designed the FirePro graphics to fulfill the requirements for the creation, management and delivery of digital content in the entertainment industry.

"Our accelerators can off-load the main processor by buffering often-used graphics information in memory resident on the FirePro accelerators," said Bahman Dara, ATI's senior product marketing manager.

According to ATI, the company worked along with vendors for the development of the 3D modeling software. Solidworks Corp. and Dassault Systems (which offers the Computer-Aided Three-Dimensional Interactive Application - Catia) are amongst these vendors. The 3D graphics accelerators line will feature an ATI built in direct vertex buffer object (VBO) support for both 3D modeling packages.

The VBO is able to store frequently used data about lines and triangles into memory on the graphics accelerator, this way eliminating the phase in which the host processor is asked to access a hard disk in order to retrieve that information. In comparison to non-VBO application execution, the new buffer offers a four-fold speed increase.

According to ATI, the new line of graphics accelerators is already able to deliver 40 percent more performance compared to the previous generation models, courtesy of AMD's latest processors.

The Sunnyvale company unveiled its entry level FireGL FireMV accelerators at the Siggraph 2008 conference in August, and will showcase its higher end FirePro accelerators at IBC 2008. The new line includes 30-bit color rendering along with support for the new DisplayPort interconnection standard, as well as 3D synchronized right- and left-eye image support for stereographic displays.