AMD FirePro V9800 4GB Professional Graphics Card Review

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 4GB 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 V9800 4GB AMD FirePro V8800 2GB AMD FirePro V7800 2GB NVIDIA Quadro 5000 2.5 GB
Video Drivers	NVIDIA Quadro 258.98 AMD FirePro 8.76.5
Power Supply	PC Power and Cooling 1000 watt
DirectX Version	DX11/ DX10 / DX9c / OpenGL
Operating System	Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit

We don’t yet have one of the new Quadro 6000 cards with 6GB of memory in house to compare to the 4GB V9800 but we’ll surely have a review on that product very soon.

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The CineBench 10 test is sorely outdated now but is included just for a reference and starting point.  The CineBench 11 test shows that the FirePro V9800 has a definite performance lead over the Quadro 5000 by 44% or so.