AMD/ATI launched a new series of professional graphics cards today under the brand name FirePro. So far, the company has announced two card models. The V3700 is an entry-level solution for CAD/CAM users on a budget, while the V5700 is a $599 midrange card that drops into the sizable gap between the $199 FireGL V3600 and the $999 FireGL V7600. Going forward, the FirePro product series will serve as a midrange complement to the already established FireGL line, but in this case, ATI has equipped the V5700 with a few features that were formerly only to be found on its highest-end solutions.

At $599, the FirePro V5700 is some $400 cheaper than the FireGL V7600 but carries a comparable—and potentially superior—feature set. Both cards are 512MB solutions backed by 320 stream processors, and while the 5700 lacks the double set of DualLink DVI outputs that the FireGL card carries, it offers two DisplayPort outputs instead. The DisplayPort interface's very existence is somewhat controversial, as HDMI offers many of the same features and is already well established in the marketplace, but DisplayPort-compatible monitors have already appeared on the market, courtesy of Dell and HP.

HP's Dreamcolor merits a mention in particular, as it's currently the only 30-bit color display on the consumer market. At $3,299 and just 24" it's hardly an impulse buy, but both the display and the ATI cards that power it will undoubtedly find traction with businesses in need of such accurate color reproduction. 30-bit displays and video cards have both existed for years but have typically been confined to grayscale medical imaging. AMD isn't betting the farm on wide consumer uptake of DisplayPort and 30-bit color, but believes its support for both features is an important technological advantage for its professional product line. NVIDIA's most recent GTX 200 series is also capable of 10-bit color output, but we've yet to see Quadro versions of these cards.





ATI's FirePro lineup

There's another bit of difference between the V5700 and the V7600, though you won't see it listed on ATI's chart. While the V7600 is based on the original R600 GPU that powered the 2900XT, the V5700 is actually built on the RV730. We've yet to see any consumer-level RV730 implementations, but this architecture is expected to power the Radeon HD 46xx series of cards. It's impossible to judge relative performance between the two solutions without clockspeed data, but the V5700 could give the older V7600 a serious workout in applications that aren't memory-bandwidth limited. The V5700 also retains the full UVD (Universal Video Decode) engine we've come to expect in an ATI product, and while it's not a must-have feature on a professional card, it's a nice perk.

Stats on the budget-model V3700 are quite modest, but the card's $99 price point makes it the cheapest professional 3D solution on the market; even the G84-derived Quadro FX 370 is $119 over at NewEgg. It's impossible to draw any meaningful performance data out of what we know thus far—AMD's benchmark results show its winning, natch, and performance characteristics in 2D are very different from what we'd expect in 3D. We do know that V3700 is powered by an RV620 GPU, which is the same GPU that's used on the HD 3430, 3450, and 3470 Radeon cards. Both the HD 3470 and the V3700 offer 15.2GBps of memory bandwidth; if we extrapolate core clock based on that, the V3700's 40 stream processors are running at 800MHz.

The Quadro FX 370 appears to be a G84 variant running at low clockspeeds. The card apparently runs at just 360MHz core, with 400MHz memory. That's well below even the clockspeeds on the old G84-based 8600 GT, and while a G84-based part should offer 32 stream processor units, it's not clear if all of these are functional in the FX 370 or not. Numbers are one thing, performance data quite another, but ATI's new entry card has a significant memory bandwidth advantage (15.2GB/s vs. 6.4GB/s) if nothing else.

Why the professional price premium?

One last topic I want to touch on is the question of why anyone would bother to buy a professional 3D card in the first place. ATI's professional cards do offer a few features the desktop line doesn't, but the cards themselves are running on the same GPUs. The FireGL V7700 is a Radeon HD 3870 down to the letter, but it costs $919.99 where the HD 3870 was considered a bad deal above $270, even at launch. The Quadro FX 4600 is the spitting image of the old G80-based GeForce 8800 GTX, but runs $1,459 at NewEgg. Given the prevalence of driver-level "soft mods" that fool programs into thinking that they're actually running on the professional version of a consumer card, why would anyone pay two to three times as much for the same exact silicon?

ATI wasn't all that interested in discussing driver hacks or software mods, but the company was more than happy to discuss why 3D professionals should (and do) favor the more expensive FireGL line over a run-of-the-mill Radeon. The difference between the two cards, according to ATI, is in the level of support dedicated to application optimization. In the case of a FireGL or FirePro product, ATI has software engineers that work in concert with application developers to deliver the best possible experience within that particular program. Professional customer feedback and information is apparently treated very seriously, as are any bug reports or issues that arise.

The implication behind the explanation is that ATI sees the relationship between itself, its customers, and application developers as a three-way partnership, of sorts. This level of support is significantly stronger than anything we see on the consumer level, and it's apparently a significant part of why video solutions at this level are so expensive—consumers are buying into an ongoing relationship, rather than making a simple product purchase. I didn't have the opportunity to talk to NVIDIA on the topic, but nothing in ATI's answer suggested that these were facts that applied only to Team Red.

With its new FirePro products, AMD has pushed professional 3D prices down to virtual parity with desktop options, while simultaneously introducing a compelling solution into the gap between its $199 and $999 price points. Hopefully, the company's work pays off in sales, as AMD could badly use the available revenue.