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.

Testing Configuration

  • Intel Core i7-965 Processor
  • ASUS P6T6 WS Revolution Motherboard
  • Corsair 3 x 2GB DDR3-1333
  • 600GB WD VelociRaptor HDD
  • PC Power and Cooling 1200 watt Turbo Cool PSU
  • Windows 7 x64

The cards we are comparing are the new Cayman-based V7900 and V5900 of course as well as the previous-generation V7800 FirePro card based on the Cypress GPU and the Quadro 5000 card based on the Fermi architecture.  Keep in mind as you look over the results the following prices: Quadro 5000 at $1599, V7900 at $999, V7800 at $699 (will be phased out) and V5900 at $599.

 

CineBench 10 and 11


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


AMD FirePro V7900 and V5900 Professional Graphics Review - Graphics Cards 4

 

 

Obviously the CB10 test is somewhat dated as the implementation runs at about the same speed on all four cards, thoguh the CB11 results are more interesting.  In this benchmark, oddly, the Cypress based V7800 is over running all the other options though we see more standard scaling on the V7900 to V5900.

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