FirePro V5700 vs Quadro FX 1700 with Catia

DEVELOP3D's hardware expert, Greg Corke, has been playing with graphics hardware again (it keeps him out of trouble). This time he's been comparing the performance of FirePro V5700 vs Quadro FX 1700 in Catia V5.
As the blurb says: The FirePro V5700 and the Quadro FX 1700 are tested side-by-side for real-time performance in CATIA using the standard CATBench high polygon count models. These tests were conducted at X3DMedia in London on Oct 25, 2008 under the supervision Greg Corke and Martyn Day of Develop 3D magazine. The tests were run on identical HP xw8600 workstations.
See the next issue of DEVELOP3D (coming very soon) for more the first in a series of articles on how to tune your graphics performance and get the best out of your hardware - this month its Catia (as you might have guessed), but we'll be covering all the biggies in the coming months.

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NVIDIA launches GPU based ray tracing at Siggraph

NVIDIA has announced that it can calculate ray traced imagery on the fly using its GPUs, claiming an industry first. Based purely on NVIDIA GPU technology, the ray tracer shows "linear scaling rendering of a highly complex, two-million polygon, anti-aliased automotive styling application." if you want to get down and dirty, then the image shown here was displayed at three bounces, performance was demonstrated at up to 30 frames per second (fps) at HD resolutions of 1920x1080 for an image-based lighting paint shader, ray traced shadows, and reflections and refractions running on four next-generation Quadro GPUs in an NVIDIA Quadro Plex 2100 D4 Visual Computing System (VCS).

Now, I know ray tracing is incredibly complex and calc heavy, but, really, if this is an industry first, shouldn't these images look better? I guess my point is that whether its full ray tracing, or fudged (some systems, like Autodesk Showcase, have some tricks to get over the calc hurdle), I think today's users expect more in terms of depth of realism.

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AMD rebrands while Nvidia gears up for extravaganza















AMD's legendary ATI Fire GL brand, which was made famous by Diamond Multimedia ten years ago, is no more. AMD has rebranded its professionalgraphics card family to ATI FirePro and at the same time launched two newcards, the FirePro V3700 and FirePro V5700.

The dropping of the 'GL' from the 'ATI Fire' brand is significant as itsname was originally inspired by OpenGL, which has been the standard for 3D graphics in CAD applications since the early nineties. However, in recentyears OpenGL has been losing ground to Microsoft's Direct3D technology with a number of software vendors, notably Autodesk, going down this route.

It would appear the rebranding is a direct result of this trend.In terms of the new cards, the ATI Fire Pro V5700 features 512MB of memory, dual link DVI and DisplayPort connections, and its true 30-bit display engine produces more than one billion colours at any given time.

This will be of particular interest to product designers for the most accurate colour reproduction, as long as they are using a compatible 30-bit monitor. For the Fire Pro V3700 ATI has followed the lead of Nvidia by introducing a professional card with an aggressive price point of below $99. The cardfeatures 256 MB of frame buffer memory, two dual-link DVI connectors.

Meanwhile, Nvidia is gearing up for its inaugural NVISION event in August,which will offer nearly 80 hours of technical and industry sessions forprofessionals in areas including automotive, high performance computing, andprofessional visualisation.

Among the bizarre array of celebrities atending the event (including Astronaut Buzz Aldrin and Battlestar Galactica actress Tricia Helfer) Bernard Charles, president and CEO of DassaultSystemes, will give a presentation, offering insights into 'what's next' for creative professionals.

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