Cadalyst - October 2007 - (Page 20)

cadlabsreview The ATI FireGL V3350 from AMD is an entry-level graphics accelerator with 256 MB of DDR2 memory. With an estimated street price of $199 and carrying a full three-year warranty, the FireGL V3350 is targeted at entry-level workstation use. The ATI FireGL V3350 features full Shader Model 3.0 support and scalable ultra-threaded architecture with true 128-bit floating-point precision. It includes two parallel geometry engines and four pixel shader processors. With its 10-bit display pipeline and high dynamic range (HDR) 16-bit per RGB color component capacities, the FireGL V3350 can produce display images with more than one trillion colors. The FireGL V3350 with ATI Avivo Technology has two DVI-I connectors, each of which will drive an analog monitor at 2,048 x 1,536 resolution at 85 Hz or a digital monitor at 1,920 x 1,200 resolution at 60 Hz on each output connector. This fully certified workstation-level graphics card works with a broad array of design, DCC, and visualization applications. The card doesn’t have dual-link connectors — for that, you’d need to move to the FireGL V3400, which is the next card in the entry-level category. The dual DVI-I outputs support any combination of digital and analog displays with independent multimonitor resolution and refresh rate selection. Dual VGA analog support is provided. Both OpenGL 2.0 and OpenGL shading language are supported in the unified drivers for the FireGL V3350, as is Microsoft DirectX 9 with Dx9 HLSL. Drivers are available for Windows XP, Windows XP64, and Windows 2000, as well as Linux 32 and Linux 64. Although the ATI FireGL V3350 is Microsoft Vista certified, support for DirectX 10 isn’t listed. The system requirements for AMD’s ATI FireGL V3350 are a PCIe-based workstation with one available 16x lane graphics slot. The system should have a 350-W or greater power supply (assuming a fully loaded system) and 512 MB of system memory. A supplemental power connector isn’t required for the V3350 — the card draws less than 35 W in operation. The software and driver CD included with the V3350 require a CD-ROM drive for installation. AMD regularly updates drivers for their graphics cards, and the latest drivers often yield the best overall performance. Just before running the benchmark test suite, I downloaded and installed Windows XP drivers v.8.353.1.1 and MAXimum v.2.0.6392 (an accelerated driver for Autodesk 3ds Max), which is the latest available from the company’s Web site at http://ati.amd.com/firegl. After I had the OS-level drivers configured, I ran the Cadalyst C2006 benchmark using AutoCAD 2008. I ran multiple tests with the default AutoCAD 2008 drivers, one set configured for OpenGL, the other for Direct3D. For the tests with AutoCAD 2008’s native OpenGL driver, I obtained a total index score of 140; for the same tests with AutoCAD 2008’s native Direct3D drivers, the total index score was 152. The tests were completed without difficulty, and these performance scores are within what I’d consider to be entry-level range. For the MAXBench4 test running under Autodesk 3ds Max 9, the ATI FireGL V3350 produced averaged high/low scores of 78.03 for the native OpenGL drivers, 92.96 for 20 October 2007 | cadalyst | www.cadalyst.com http://ati.amd.com/firegl http://www.photomodeler.com http://www.photomodeler.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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