Cadalyst - October 2007 - (Page 19)

cadlabsreview the graphics cards designed to use the new bus. Because the new generation of graphics cards will also require new computers to take advantage of the increased bandwidth, I expect that it will be a few months before they make it into general use. In the interim and for the near future, existing PCIe graphics cards will be used most commonly for workstation-level graphics. Because PCIe2 is backward compatible with the current PCIe specification, the graphics cards that Cadalyst looks at in this article will be usable in the new PCIe2 slot. However, they won’t be able to use the extra bandwidth available. In addition to bandwidth limitations in the current PCIe slot, these cards also have power limitations, with the new specification providing support for the more powerful generation of graphics cards. In the interim, the current crop of graphics cards offers good performance and value. For this roundup article, I tested the ATI FireGL V3350, an entry-level workstation graphics card from AMD, and the Quadro FX 4600 and the Quadro FX 5600, two ultrahigh-end graphics cards from NVIDIA. I included all three of these graphics cards in the main body of the article because they’re all certified for numerous professional-level design applications. These three also offer accelerated drivers for applications such as Autodesk 3ds Max. Autodesk supports all three cards for AutoCAD. Many readers also run AutoCAD and other similar applications on graphics cards that are uncertified, so I’ve included a sidebar about the recently introduced Diamond Viper ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT, a consumer-level graphics card I tested using the normal Cadalyst benchmark suite. An additional sidebar describes the @Xi Computer test system I used for testing all the cards in this article. Testing Procedures For testing the graphics cards, I used a new system from @Xi Computer: the Xi MTower PCIe workstation, which is based on an EVGA NVIDIA nForce 680i SLI motherboard that uses the NVIDIA 680i chipset. Although this motherboard supports graphics cards in an SLI configuration, all the tests were done with single graphics cards installed. The system had an Intel Core 2 E6850 rated at 2.93 GHz that was water-cooled and overclocked to 3.20 GHz. Our test system was preloaded with Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 installed. The requested configuration included 2.0 GB of 1,066-MHz DDR2 RAM, a 150-MB Western Digital Raptor 150-GB hard drive, and a Lite-ON 18 x 10 x 40 x 12 optical drive. When I was ready to start the tests, I downloaded the latest released drivers from the vendors’ Web sites and installed them before run- ning the benchmarks. If an accelerated driver for Autodesk 3ds Max was available, I also downloaded it and used the most current version. For the first part of the benchmark tests, I ran the Cadalyst C2006 benchmark under AutoCAD 2008 and tested performance with both AutoCAD’s native OpenGL drivers and its Direct3D drivers. If an accelerated AutoCAD driver was available, I noted it in the online feature table (www.cadalyst.com/1007cards-table) but did not use it for testing. All cards were tested at 1,280 x 1,024 resolution at 32-bit color depth. I used MAXBench4 with Autodesk 3ds Max 9 for this benchmark, typically in three configurations: with the native OpenGL drivers, with the native Direct3D drivers, and with any third-party accelerated driver that was available for 3ds Max. I will provide all three sets of results for the tests, both in the individual discussion of the graphics cards and in the online feature table. I had been considering changing to the full SPECViewperf test (www.spec.org) rather than just using the ProE Viewset, and just before I began my evaluations for this article, SPEC released the new SPECViewperf 10 test that works under both Windows XP and Vista. So the timing seemed good to begin. This article is the first with both the new SPEC benchmark and the full test results. This survey roundup seems to include something for everyone. With estimated street prices ranging from $199 to $2,500, there’s certainly a wide budgetary range and, as one might expect, a good range of performance characteristics as well. Among the choices for workstation-level graphics cards are some of the best made, and some of them are covered in this Cadalyst roundup review. All of the cards discussed in this article are covered by three-year warranties and fill needs for workstation-level performance. Though a new generation of graphics cards is on the way, the current generation still has plenty of life for some time to come. ATI FireGL V3350 AMD Introduced earlier this year 905.882.2600 after the Advanced Micro Device (AMD) purchase of ATI, www.ati.amd.com Price: $199 the FireGL V3350 is the middle product of the three entrylevel workstation graphics cards offered by AMD. It features 256 MB of onboard memory. The ATI FireGL V3350 is a PCIe 16x graphics card based on the RV515 graphics accelerator running at 400 MHz. www.cadalyst.com | cadalyst | October 2007 19 http://www.cadalyst.com/1007cards-table http://www.spec.org http://www.ati.amd.com http://www.cadalyst.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Cadalyst - October 2007

Contents Editor's Window Cad Central Tech Trends: First-Hand Architecture in Second Life Rev It Up — Graphics Cards Pack Power for Today’s Hottest Designs TurboCAD Pro 14 — 3D Modeling Software SimEnterprise R2 — Design Simulation Software CADopia 6.2 SP3 Professional Edition — 2D and 3D Modeling Software Cad Manager: Programming Resources for CAD Managers MCAD Modeling: Customer Service Horror Stories PLM Strategies: Manufacturing Across Time Zones AEC in Focus: Digital-Asset Management in AEC/O Cad Cartoon Issue Indexes Cadfidential

Cadalyst - October 2007

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