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ATI Technologies
FireGL V3400, FireGL V5200, FireGL V7200, FireGL V7300 and V7350
ATI Technologies
866.284.2093
www.ati.com
Prices: $295-$1,999
FireGL V3400
The least expensive graphics card in this roundup at $295, the ATI FireGL V3400 is well positioned for economical, entry-level workstation use. A single-width PCIe card that doesn't require an extra power input, the V3400 features 128MB of onboard GDDR3 memory with a 256-bit ring bus memory controller.
All of the new ATI FireGL V series-the V is for visualization-incorporate ATI's Avivo technology, which allow them to reproduce more than one trillion colors. Avivo technology provides 16-bit per RGB color component HDR (high dynamic range) and offers a full 10-bit precision display pipeline. Avivo offers advanced support for 8-bit, 10-bit and 16-bit per RGB color components, so it supports today's display technology as well as emerging high-definition color displays that are in development.
The ATI FireGL V3400 implements full Shader Model 3.0 support and a scalable ultrathreaded architecture with 128-bit floating point precision, 5 parallel geometry engines, and 12-pixel shader processors. The card provides a single dual-link output connector and a standard DVI-I output. You can drive two monitors with the FireGL V3400. Resolutions of 3840x2400 with 16.7 million colors at 48Hz and 1920x1200 with 1.07 billion colors at 60Hz are possible using the dual- and single-link connectors, respectively. The card can drive an analog display at 2048x1536 at 75Hz.
The FireGL V3400 is optimized and certified for numerous OpenGL and DirectX CAD and DCC applications and carries a three-year warranty.
I tested the ATI FireGL V3400 on the @Xi Computer MTower 64SLI system using the ATI drivers current at the time of testing-v8.223.00, along with the ATI MAXimum accelerated driver v2.6.5648 for the 3ds max components of the benchmarks. The FireGL V3400 produced a total index score of 128 on the Cadalyst C2006 benchmark with AutoCAD 2005. Using MAXBench4 with 3ds max with Service Pack 2 installed, the V3400 generated a low frame-rate score of 114.2 and a high frame-rate score of 92.98, for an averaged high/low score of 103.5. The SPEC ViewPerf 8.10 ProE-03 viewset, which tends to follow the general performance of the graphics card, produced a weighted geometric mean score of 56.57.
Although these scores may seem low, they are good...