Ati’s 1gb Firegl V7350

zeem35 · March 23, 2006

The battle between ATI and nVidia just stepped up a notch with the introduction of the ATI FireGL V7350 GPU. The V7350’s claim to fame is that it is the first GPU to boast a full 1GB of memory. Meant for workstations, the card features ATI’s Avivo video and display technology, which increases the color depth to 10-bit and allows for a color palette of over a billion colors. Born of the 90nm design process, the V7350 also has a 512-bit ring bus speed. How much would you pay for such a card? Well, $1999 is the price that Alienware et al. are looking for. Looks like it’s time to take a second mortgage. :blink:

Never to be outdone, ATI Technologies has announced the industry’s first one gigabyte (1GB) workstation graphics accelerator, the ATI FireGL V7350, and also a 512MB configuration, the FireGL V7300.

Featuring an extremely powerful ultra-threaded parallel processing GPU, and ATI’s industry leading Avivo video and display technology, these new ultra high-end graphics cards have been designed to further extend ATI’s workstation graphics line, promising better performance, more advanced features and higher image quality.

ATI’s Avivo video and display platform brings an increased level of visual fidelity to the professional graphics market with features such as automatic gain control, gamma correction and increased colour bit depth. With a 10-bit per RGB component graphics pipeline, instead of the standard 8-bit, the FireGL’s colour palette increases to over a billion colours.

The result should be a finer level of detail throughout the visible spectrum, enhancing details in shadows and making highlights come to life. In addition, high-end displays supporting 16-bit per RGB color component can be fully utilized by the FireGL V7350 and FireGL V7300. Two dual-link connectors also give end users the ability to drive multiple ultra-high resolution displays, yielding a massive desktop display over 5000 pixels wide.

Based on a cutting-edge 90nm process technology and a 512-bit ring bus memory architecture, the FireGL V7350 and FireGL V7300 are able to take advantage of higher speed memories and support 1GB and 512MB frame buffers respectively. 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.

ATI’s FireGL products are supported by a unified driver, which is tested and certified by professional 3D ISV partners, making system administration and upgrades cost effective and simple. All FireGL products come with a three year warranty and direct access to a dedicated workstation technical support team.

The FireGL V7350 and FireGL V7300 are shipping today from Workstation System Integrators - Alienware, Amax, Boxx, Colfax, Monarch Computer Systems, Omnitech, Polywell, Safe Harbor, Systemax, Polywell, Velocity Micro, Xi Computer and 3dshop.com - from distributors - Althon Micro, Armari, Cad2, D&H, Exxact, Ingram Micro, JB&A, Leading Technology, Noesse Daten Technik GmbH, Synnex, Tech Data and Xworks Interactive - and Value Added Resellers at $1999 (£1139) and $1599 (£911)