ATI's 1GB Video Card 273
Signify writes "ATI recently released pics and info about it's upcoming FireGL V7350 graphics card. The card features 1GB of GDDR3 Memory and a workstation graphics accelerator. From the article: 'The high clock rates of these new graphics cards, combined with full 128-bit precision and extremely high levels of parallel processing, result in floating point processing power that exceeds a 3GHz Pentium processor by a staggering seven times, claims the company.'"
Re:use as a cpu? (Score:5, Informative)
[1] True of ray tracing. Almost true of current graphics techniques.
Too bad its still an ATI... (Score:4, Informative)
Graphic card makers should get with the program and stop releasing firegl's and quadros. Just release really kick ass 3d accelerators for all.
That way we can all have full opengl support and not the lame opengl game drivers by ATI. Nvidia's gaming card opengl drivers are better than ATIs
Re:what... teh.....fuk (Score:5, Informative)
ATI Sucks for driver support with Linux (Score:2, Informative)
I really don't give a flying *uck if any company, be it ATI or Nvidia comes out with the latest and greatest video card if it does not have proper driver support! Anyone who's run linux for awhile knows the drill.
Re:ATI Sucks for driver support with Linux (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Awesome! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Whoa. (Score:4, Informative)
Not likely OS level (Score:2, Informative)
For more general purpose FPOPs you will have a hell of a time getting enough gain in floating point performance to overcome the overhead chatter between the CPU and GPU that would be required to keep the states in synch.
I'd go so far as to say if the process can't be near complely moved (the CPU will need to feed it data and suck up results) onto the GPU then don't bother.
But I'm talking out of my ass, it could work. I'm just skeptical.
Re:what... teh.....fuk (Score:3, Informative)
Re:use as a cpu? (Score:1, Informative)
However if you have large amounts of data and want to process it over and over, you can afford to transfer it to a dedicated processor. This also happens to be what this card is designed to do.
Re:ATI works great for me with Linux (Score:2, Informative)
Also frustrating is the lack of support for games played through Cedega, I just installed the Cedega timedemo tonight and Guild Wars almost but not quite works. I have characters missing heads and the frame rate is about 2 frames per second. I can get decent frame rates with a different setting but it crashes if I go to another district. This may be fixable, but so far my next computer is going to have an nVidia GPU.
Not for gaming, for graphics workstations!! (Score:3, Informative)
This card is for people who need serious rendering of high detailed scenes and 3D objects, not serious frame rates for games. For applications where image quality, complexity, and accuracy are much more important than frame rate. The GPUs in these high end workstation cards are geared in a totaly different manner and actually suck for video games! These are great for CAD/CAM, medical imaging (like from CAT and EBT scanners), chemical modeling, and lots of other hard core scientific and 3D developement type stuff.
Re:use as a cpu? (Score:5, Informative)
Funny you should mention that. The Intel 386 (and up) architecture has built in support for a floating point coprocessor, so it can offload floating point operations. In the early days, you could buy a 387 math coprocessor to accelerate floating point performance. Then Intel integrated the 387 coprocessor onto the 486 series cpus, and today we just know it as "the floating point unit" (although it's been much revised, parallelized, and super-scaled).
As for offloading to a GPU, well... that's what we do today. It's called Direct3D, or Mesa, or Glide, or your favorite 3D acceleration library. The problem with this approach is that it requires very specialized code. It's not something that can be automatically done for just any code, as the overhead of loading the GPU, setting up the data, and retrieving the results would far exceed the performance gains. In only extereme cases does it pay off: the workload has to be extremely parallelizable, with almost no branching and predictable calculations. Basically what it ends up is that the algorithm has to be extensively tailered to the GPU. Even IBM has had major issues offloading general purpose operations to their special processing units, and those are much more closely coupled to the CPU.
Re:use as a cpu? (Score:3, Informative)
ATI loves you in the ass (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=13844 [osnews.com]
If you are talking about XGI, ATI just bought them and closed the code.
http://www.linuxgames.com/news/feedback.php?ident
Re:Not bad... (Score:3, Informative)
-Rick
Speaking from a purely (Score:2, Informative)
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=148531 [ubuntuforums.org]
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=122094 [ubuntuforums.org]
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=148415 [ubuntuforums.org]
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=141090 [ubuntuforums.org]
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=137343 [ubuntuforums.org]
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=76147 [ubuntuforums.org]
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=75001 [ubuntuforums.org]
This is probably the largest complaint we get on the Ubuntu Forums and the UDSF(http://doc.gwos.org/ [gwos.org] in the way of graphics cards. I think I even remember being told at one point that ATI is so driven on DirectX development that they likely dont care much about developing Open Source Drivers, or even a decent working Proprietary driver.
There have been a few Petitions to do so
http://www.petitiononline.com/atipet/petition.htm
http://www.petitiononline.com/ati3/petition.html [petitiononline.com]
And countless others. The community asks, almost begs, and all ATI does it laugh.
Its sad, really sad.
http://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/Main_Page [cchtml.com]
Please don't joke about this. (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, they are 128-bit floats. They're needed for doing HDR.
PLEASE don't joke about this.
Do you have any idea how many math/physics/chem/engineering geeks would just kill for 128-bits in hardware?
It would be very, very cruel to get their hopes up like that, only to find out that you were being sarcastic...
Re:Good thing this is a workstation card (Score:3, Informative)
Because 90% of programming is an excersize in caching, and if you can just cache the textures you can let your GPU just get 'em instead of waiting for it to finish saying "g-g-g-give me a t-t-t-tex... t-t-text-t-t-... gimme a damn bitmap!"
Re:Please don't joke about this. (Score:3, Informative)