AMD FirePro V5800 and V3800 Review – Evergreen completes the sweep

Testing Methodology, System Setup and CineBench 11/10

Testing professional graphics board is a much different beast that our reviews on consumer graphics solutions that focus nearly completely on gaming.  The user interested in a Quadro or FirePro card MIGHT be curious how the card performs in gaming, but in reality the decision to buy a card of this cost is based on other application performance: 3D modeling, CAD and design tools. 

By far the most interesting tests for us with this kind of product are the SPEC series of benchmarks.  SPECviewperf has long been a staple for evaluating professional level application performance and the newest version enables us to test a multitude of results.  Applications like Maya, 3D Studio Max, SolidWorks and UGS NX are simulated as are several others; the benchmark allows us to easily test how the graphics cards help in scaling with multisampling as well as multi-threaded processing. 

Also, we have included the OpenGL portion of the CineBench 10 and 11 rendering benchmark and even given 3DMark Vantage a whirl for those of you really interested in how 2GB of frame buffer affects performance.
 

Test System Setup
CPU	Intel Core i7-965
Motherboards	ASUS P6T6 WS Revolution
Memory	Corsair 3 x 2GB DDR3-1333
Hard Drive	Western Digital VelociRaptor 300GB
Sound Card	on-board
Video Card	AMD FirePro V8800 2GB AMD FirePro V5800 1GB AMD FirePro V3800 512MB NVIDIA Quadro FX 3800 1GB
Video Drivers	NVIDIA Quadro 197.54 AMD FirePro 8.723.6
Power Supply	PC Power and Cooling 1000 watt
DirectX Version	DX11/ DX10 / DX9c / OpenGL
Operating System	Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit

I have to admit we don’t have nearly the selection of Quadro cards as we do GeForce options but I did have a newer Quadro FX 3800 card on hand to pit against the new V5800 and V3800 cards from AMD.  The FX 3800 from NVIDIA current sells for about $850 – above the $469 that we expect to see the new FirePro V5800 sell for and WELL above the $109 the V3800 is estimated at.  When we get more options from both AMD and NVIDIA we will be doing another all-encompassing professional graphics roundup. 

CineBench 10 and 11

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This rendering benchmark based off of the Cinema 4D engine is a terrific indicator for multi-threaded processing.



The CineBench 10 results are pretty limited in scaling because of the test’s age but in the CineBench 11 results you can see the AMD FirePro line is pretty compelling.  The FirePro V5800 is nearly twice as fast as the Quadro FX 3800 here and even the $109 FirePro V3800 is only 50% or so behind it.