The professional AMD FirePro workstation series has more and more cooperation with the leading ISVs. Designers can clearly feel the performance boost through the optimized programs. In exhibits, including Siggraph held in the U.S. and IBC held in Amsterdam in 2012, up to the NAB exhibit which just ended in April 2013, the close work and excellent performances between AMD and professional software designers were demonstrated. Recently, the business director of the AMD FirePro department, Mr. Caracappa, lead his team to demonstrate actual tests in various countries in the Asia-Pacific region to allow users to see the outstanding performance with their own eyes and feel the all new usage experiences that these new designs can bring for them.
AMD FirePro has many leading and innovative cooperation exchanges with companies in various industries, such as the Reality Deck displayed in the CEWIT exhibit at the end of 2012: 416 high resoultion monitors were used to surround 4 walls to form a 3D virtual reality environment with 70 FirePro V9800 graphics cards. Every graphics card was able to output to 6 monitors and 4 graphics cards were able to operate simultaneously in one computer host. A total of 18 computer hosts were synchronized and connected using AMD FirePro S400, and further formed this interactvice virtual environment using 416 monitors which had a total of 1.5 billion pixels. Another example was the world's first 8K LCD display, the hardware support was also driven by the AMD FirePro product. Also, the simulation environment of the Ferrrari races, etc.
In the Workstation graphics world, focusing on the ISV solutions means everything - providing a stable, certified, and unparalelled performance in key applications is paramount.
The following are sharings of actual test results with CAD/CAM/DCC:
- AMD FirePro provided an exclusive advantage for PTC Creo 2, called "Order Independent Transparency (OIT)". This is not provided by any other current competitor. AMD showed us in a live demonstration how this works. While the AMD solution was completely smooth when moving the model, the NVIDIA was very choppy and stuttering.
Only the FirePro W5000 allows you to turn on the OIT option.
- Actual test with Solidworks 2013: some basic tests were done using a SolidWork model, such as: Render mode shaded, Shaded with Edge or Realview, etc. The models were opened simultaneously, and the computing status could be seen.
Actual on-site testing of the transparency of a motorcycle model.
- In the DCC space, Adobe revealed their next generation of Premiere video editing software, which uses the well known proprietary Mercury engine - they will be adding OpenCL acceleration, a move that more and more software developers are making. OpenCL is an open standard technology, that can use the GPU to accelerate pretty much anything. It doesn't lock you to a certain vendor, like CUDA, and it can take advantage of the CPU and GPU. It's important to note, that in the mobile space, NVIDIA powered laptops can't take advantage of any acceleration, as CUDA is not available on mobile parts. While AMD enables OpenCL on all their graphics products. AMD showed us a live demonstration of this new Mercury engine, and it showed that the rendering time for a 1080p clip went a lot faster, than on the CPU alone.
The program automatically loaded the OpenCL option; the competitor has the CUDA option.
PCIe gen3 is also something that AMD is touting to be a very important feature, that current competitor lacks. Applications, like Assimilate's Scratch needs massive bandwidth between the components, like GPU, CPU and memory when manipulating 4k images - only PCIe gen 3, available with AMD's FirePro W series can deliver that.
SAPPHIRE PGS will continue to provide AMD FirePro all series products, more special advantages from cooperating with ISV, better cost/performance value and more diverse solutions, such as: digial signages, medical applications, servers and cloud concept products and the new Radeon Sky, etc.
Virtual environment formed with 416 monitors, the world's first 8K monitor display and the simulation exhibit of a Ferrari F1 race.