AMD FirePro V8800 Review – Evergreen and Cypress Go Pro

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.

AMD FirePro V8800	AMD FirePro V8700
NVIDIA Quadro FX 4800

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 V8700 1GB NVIDIA Quadro FX 4800 1.5GB
Video Drivers	NVIDIA Quadro 197.03 AMD FirePro 8.702
Power Supply	PC Power and Cooling 1000 watt
DirectX Version	DX11/ DX10 / DX9c / OpenGL
Operating System	Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit

For our comparison we will be looking at how the new FirePro V8800 ($1499) compares with the previous generation high-end professional graphics card, the V8700 ($875) as well as NVIDIA’s currently comparable option, the Quadro FX 4800 ($1449)

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.



While both CB10 and CB11 pit the V8800 and the Quadro FX 4800 in a close race, AMD claims that its drivers haven’t been fully tested and completed on the Cinema 4D rendering engine, the same used in the latest 11.5 iteration of our benchmark here.  They told us that the next driver release coming in the next 30 days or so would drastically improve performance in that case and our benchmark results would go up by as much as 20% – we’ll have to wait and see there.