ATI FireGL
FireGL is a brand name of the company Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and previously the company ATI Technologies for professional graphics cards and designates a series of professional 3D graphics cards, which are used for various applications in the fields of CAD / CAM / CAE, animation, visualization, simulation, etc. are certified. For games or normal office applications, on the other hand, these cards do not have any advantages, although like their Radeon brothers they also support Direct3D . In 2008, AMD replaced the FireGL brand with the FirePro brand .
ATI uses modified Radeon graphics chips for the FireGL products , in which the GPU ID is changed by special wiring and special functions such as "AA lines" are enabled by the driver. With the FireGL graphics cards, ATI competes with the Quadro series from NVIDIA and the now discontinued Wildcat series from 3DLabs .
history
The FireGL series originally came from Diamond Multimedia . The name itself was borrowed from the professional graphics cards with the addition Fire from the no longer existing German graphics card pioneer Spea Software , who had initially bought Video7 and later merged into Diamond. The GL in FireGL is borrowed from the graphics API OpenGL and is intended to relate to 3D acceleration. In the field of professional 2D applications (image processing, multi-head solutions for stock exchanges, medicine, etc.) ATI offers the FireMV variants ( MV = Multi View).
The first FireGL card developed by ATI was the FireGL 8700, which is based on the Radeon 8500. The FireGL 1/2/3/4 also offered by ATI, on the other hand, still came from Diamond Multimedia in terms of design and used IBM raster and geometry processors . The latter were pure OpenGL accelerators and only had very rudimentary Direct3D support. A 64-bit PCI version of the FireGL 3 was offered by HP as FireGL-UX for its own HP9000 workstation series, where it provided twice the performance of the fastest VisualizeFX card (VisualizeFX10 Pro). The FireGL-UX was also the last graphics card for HP9000 workstations with a 64-bit PCI bus, in the last PA-RISC workstation HP c8000 normal AGP versions of the FireGL T2, Z1, X1-256p and X2 are used.
driver
The FireGL drivers of the Radeon-based FireGL cards are based on the current Catalyst drivers. While the Direct3D part is identical to the Catalyst drivers, the OpenGL part has been replaced with a version optimized for professional applications. The Control Panel with FireGL cards also offers significantly fewer settings than with Radeon graphics cards. You can choose from various profiles for many professional applications which activate certain driver settings. Drivers are available for Windows and Linux . Unlike Nvidia , AMD does not serve the Macintosh market with the FireGL series.
FireGL Mobility
In addition to the desktop models, there are also mobile versions known as FireGL Mobility , which were designed for use in notebooks and have various power-saving functions. These are basically identical GPUs to the Radeon Mobility variants. In contrast to the desktop GPUs, the drivers for Radeon Mobility and FireGL Mobility are identical.
Models (incomplete)
For desktop computers
AGP based
- FireGL 1-4 ( hardware design by Diamond Multimedia )
- FireGL 8700
- FireGL 8800
- FireGL E1
- FireGL T1-64
- FireGL T2-128
- FireGL Z1-128
- FireGL X1-128
- FireGL X1-256p
- FireGL X2-256
- FireGL X2-256t
- FireGL X3-256
ATI FireGL visualization series
- FireGL V3100
- FireGL V5000
- FireGL V5100
- FireGL V7100
2006 series - ATI FireGL visualization series
- FireGL V3300
- FireGL V3350
- FireGL V3400
- FireGL V5200
- FireGL V7200
- FireGL V7300
- FireGL V7350
2007 series - ATI FireGL visualization series with Unified Shader technology
- FireGL V3600
- FireGL V5600
- FireGL V7600 (R600)
- FireGL V7700 (RV670)
- FireGL V8600 (R600)
- FireGL V8650 (R600)
For notebooks
AGP based
- FireGL Mobility 7800
- FireGL Mobility T2
- FireGL Mobility 9000
PCIe based
- FireGL Mobility V3100
- FireGL Mobility V3200
- FireGL Mobility V5000
- FireGL Mobility V5200
- FireGL Mobility V5250
- FireGL Mobility V5700: Radeon HD 3650 chip
Individual evidence
- ↑ Specifications and benchmarks of the V3100
- ↑ Specifications and benchmarks of the V3200
- ↑ Specifications and benchmarks of the V5000
- ↑ Specifications and benchmarks of the V5200
- ↑ Specifications and benchmarks of the HD 3650