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Two graphics cards supply good performance and lots of onboard RAM for graphically demanding applications.
Earlier this year, AMD sent Cadalyst two of its highend graphics cards for evaluation and testing - the ATI FireGL V8600, which features 1 GB of onboard RAM, and the ATI FireGL V8650, which was the first card on the market with 2 GB of RAM. I tested both of these full-length graphics cards and put them through their paces with Cadalyst's current benchmark series.
These RAM-heavy cards are intended for users who work with memory-intensive applications. The Cadalyst benchmark tests give a very good evaluation of performance with a wide range of applications, but none of these benchmarks specifically address the full memory capabilities of such graphics cards.
System requirements for the both of the graphics cards were a PCI Express-based workstation with an available 16x lane graphics slot; connectors to the system power supply, which must be at least 650 W (assuming a fully loaded system); and 256 MB of system memory. Software installation required a CD-ROM drive.
Software drivers for both cards were available for Windows XP and XP64, Linux 32 and Linux 64, as well as Windows Vista and Windows Vista 64. Acceleration support for OpenGL 2.1 with OpenGL Shading Language and Microsoft DirectX 10 was incorporated.
Testing Procedures
I tested both the ATI FireGL V8600 and ATI FireGL V8650 in an Xi MTower 2P64X Workstation from @Xi Computer with dual Intel Core 2 Extreme quad-core processors that were overclocked to 3.60 GHz. (Cadalyst will be reviewing this system in an upcoming review.) This system configuration features a 1,600-MHz front-side bus speed and included 4 GB of DDR2, 800-MHz FB-DIMM ECC dual-rank interleaved heat-spreader RAM. All tests were conducted under Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 installed, with the most current ATI WHQL-certified drivers available at the time of the testing, which were v.8.440.0.0, dated November 16, 2007. At the time of the tests, no accelerated drivers for Autodesk 3ds Max 2008 were available for use with either of the these graphics cards. (New drivers that support AutoCAD 2008 and 3ds Max are now available at http://ati.amd.com/support/driver.html.)
I ran our current test suite, which includes the Cadalyst C2008 benchmark (www.cadalyst.com/c2008) running under AutoCAD 2008...