ATI Fire GL Cards

[AmishSlayer]

Wow.. I just saw these on ati's site. These are some expensive cards. They seem to be upgrades on the Radeon's. I've seen them based on 8800, 9600 and 9800. Anyone know more specific info on what exactly they have improved upon? What is the difference between say a 9800 and a Fire GL 9800? According to newegg... the 9800 Fire GL is $759... that's outside my budget...

 

[Doobz]

Fire GL cards and Qaudro FX cards are not for games at all, in fact, they suck playing games

they are purely workstation cards, able to render very large polygon counts and very large and very hi res textures fast, but because of the specialized architecture and drivers, they simply do not work with dynamic rendering, such as games

 

[nercalu]

Not quite true anymore...

Fire GL cards and Qaudro FX cards are not for games at all, in fact, they suck playing games

they are purely workstation cards, able to render very large polygon counts and very large and very hi res textures fast, but because of the specialized architecture and drivers, they simply do not work with dynamic rendering, such as games

They may be marketed as purely workstation cards, but the majority of the underlying hardware in the newer FireGL cards is the same as the Radeon series (newer being R300, R350, etc).

It's been noted that you can flash the onboard ROM and install specially patched drivers to turn a 9800Pro 128MB into a FireGL X2. Successfully patching other Radeon models is also documented. As a result, performance is comparable in the corresponding models of each card. But then, why pay more for a FireGL when you can get the same thing from a Radeon? (except for the "professional" bundled software and connectivity options)

As an addendum, it's been widely noted (and also makes sense) that ATI and nVidia both figured they'd make out better financially by using the same core for both product lines.

 

[Alientank]

FireGL cards are expensive yes, but they are great for development.