About two weeks ago I came home to find a large box addressed to me. Inside was a test computer from ATI loaded with their FirePro V5700 graphics card. ATI asked that some of us bloggers test out this card some time ago and I got to be one of the first. I haven’t touched an ATI card in four or five years. I had all sorts of annoying problems and haven’t heard enough good things in the intervening years to want to. However, I was looking forward to trying this one out. In the past few months, there’s been some rumblings about ATI and the progress they’ve made with their cards.
The machine they sent was an HP wx4600 with the following specs:
- XP Pro – 32 bit
- Core2 Duo E8600@3.33 GHz
- 4Gb Ram
- ATI FirePro V5700 (Driver version 8.543.0.0)
- It came loaded with SolidWorks Premium 2009 as well.
I created all sorts of funky models, assemblies and their related drawings and was not unhappy with the results. I loaded up a large assembly I have (~4500 parts) and, again, not unhappy with the results. I didn’t see any of the “ghosting” I’ve seen, and heard about, nor was there any choppiness or any other funky graphics issues. In the model/assembly arena, the card did very well.
The one area that I did see a problem was in PhotoWorks. Some of the renderings I did just weren’t quite right. The part would have striations running through it and I kept losing the reflection off the floor. Obviously, if you use PhotoWorks, this would cause you great pains. Just to be sure, I tried the exact same thing on my M4300, and didn’t see the same thing. As a matter of fact, the renders looked much nicer.
Another thing that I couldn’t quite figure out was the settings for the card. With nVidia cards, there’s a nice interface where you get choose your 3D package and let it drive the settings. For someone like me, that’s a huge bonus. With the ATI interface, I saw no such options. There were a bunch of different categories to choose from, and you’d get previews of changes, but I, personally, just wasn’t sure about what I was changing sometimes. Obviously, this could be attributed to my lack of knowledge in the graphics settings area.
Overall, the card wasn’t bad. Would I run out and buy one? No, it just didn’t impress me enough to switch from nVidia. Plus, the issues with PhotoWorks make me a bit leery. However, individual test results may vary. Over the coming weeks, the other bloggers will be writing about their experiences with the same machine, so stay tuned.
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