ATI FirePro V5700

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.

Share and Enjoy:

April 9, 2009 · Posted in Hardware Review, SolidWorks Community

Comments

WIll C.

I just bought one of these for my new SolidWorks/FARO Arm build. The price ($1,099) was just too good compared to the high end Nvidia cards. That and the V5700 is built on ATI's best gaming card, whereas the highest end Nvidia CAD cards are still using older gaming cards as the base. Also I'm building around an AMD Phenom II CPU so there's some family connection.
When I finish building it, load my software and take it for a few laps I'll let you know how it does.
WIll C.

An online review of this card w/benchmarks:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-firepro...
Allen Bourgoyne

Jeff,

We have tried to replicate the issues you described without success here at AMD. We take customer issues very seriously, if you can provide some details, steps to reproduce and test data if possible, we will try to replicate this in house. As mentioned in a previous post, PW render is CPU based, so the GPU has little to do other than display the final image. As to ATI cards and SolidWorks, much has changed. ATI introduced newly re-architected graphics drivers about 18 months ago, drivers that provide greater stability, performance, and reliability than ever before. We have engineers actively engaged with SolidWorks, working on technology integration, performance, and certification efforts. We include the SolidWorks certification test suite as part of our regular driver test process. As another post mentioned, ATI drivers automatically optimize graphics settings with no user intervention required so that users can run multiple applications simultaneously and get optimal performance for each application, no need to drop out of your application, bring up a control panel and switch settings every time you move between applications.

If you can provide additional information, we will continue to investigate any issues you may have encountered.

Thanks

Allen Bourgoyne
Manager, ISV Team
AMD Professional Graphics
allen.bourgoyne@amd.com
JeffMirisola

Allen,
Thank you for your response. The one model I created, that had the most noticeable striations, was just a bolt that I applied a brass material to. It just looked real funky. I tried various backgrounds and scenes, but nothing seemed to work.
In talking with others, though, it seems that it may just be an anomaly specific to me.

Jeff
Rob Eodriguez

Hi Jeff,
Yeah it's funny we had such a different experience? PhotoWorks rendering worked fine for me and I even played with PV360 a bit without issue. Nether PW or PV360 are really GPU dependant so the graphics card should have minimal impact on rendering. It would be interesting to see if your saved render had the same issues as the screen render. RealView is GPU dependant and even though I use it very little I did keep it turned on while using the ATI card. Colors, textures, shadowing. reflections in RV all worked OK.

I did look at the ATI control panel but didn't change any of the settings. I wanted to run it "out of the box" and see how it worked.
Devon T. Sowell

Hi Jeff-

Thanks for this review.

So, nothing's changed as far as ATI video cards and SolidWorks, they still don't work very well.

Devon Sowell
JeffMirisola

Devon,
They still seem a bit sketchy to me. It'll be interesting to see what happens when Anna and Rob put the cards through their paces.

Jeff
Allen

With ATI cards, you don't have to select specific graphics settings for applications like on Nvidia. The ATI driver automatically sets the graphics settings when you start the application. You get the same result as manually selecting applications on Nvidia, it's just automatic, you don't have to do anything.
JeffMirisola

Allen,
Thank you for the settings information. That'll teach me to read the instructions.
That being said, I still was less than impressed with the quality and can't help but wonder if it didn't have something to do with not being able to select the settings per application.

Jeff

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