It’s true that gamers love their high-end graphics hardware…but it’s also true that many of the really high-end toys target graphics professionals in the broadcast, CAD, digital modeling, and medical imaging fields. With those folks in mind, AMD has just released its ATI FirePro V8800 graphics card, a high-performance card based on the ATi Radeon HD 5000 series that brings 1,600 stream processors, 2 GB of GDDR5 video memory, and support for up to four displays…right out of the box.
The FirePro V8800 offers 2.6 teraflops of computing power along with what AMD claims is the highest memory bandwidth available on any single-card solution (147.2 GB/s). The card supports OpenGL 3.2 (4.0 support coming soon), OpenCL 1.0, and DirectX 11—along with DirectCompute 11. The card also features AutoDetect functionality to optimize performance in multi-application workflows, and all four display outputs can be synchronized with the ATI FirePro S400 Synchronization module.
But all this doesn’t come cheap: the ATI FirePro V8800 is priced at $1,499—and it’s just the first in what AMD is promising will be a series of high-end AT FirePro solutions aimed at digital content creators, CAD professionals, broadcasters, medical imaging, and other professional niches.
