What can a FireGL card do, that a 'normal' card cannot?

[felinusz]

A friend needs a laptop capable of CAD work, and is of the mindset that he needs an expensive FireGL card (he is also Biased towards ATi :)).

Tell the newb (me), what exactly is a FireGL card capable of that a normal card is not capable of?



I am of the udnerstanding that the hardware is identical.

If there is a BIOS/Driver differerence, can a "normal" card of the same hardware spec as it's FireGL equivelent, be software modified into the equivelent of a FireGL card?



Input appreciated :)

[freakdiablo]

I seem to recall seeing that a bios flash can change a firegl to a radeon or the other way around, but dont quote me on it.

[White_Pawn]

Absolutely nothing. :beer:

If you take a look at the specifications of each card, you can tell that they use the same core as normal graphics cards but charge 10x more.

You can also bios flash a normal card and get a "firegl" or "Quadro" I remember i could flash my 6600GT into the nv570 or something like that.

However, there MAY be some cases where in the Firegl or Quadro that they add more slower ram. For instance, they may have a 2900XT w/ 1gig DDR2 vs a normal 2900XT w/ 512 GDDR3. (then again, you can get the 2900XT w/ 1 gig anyway.)

[Rinne]

taken from wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATI_FireGL

Though often being developed in the same time frame with Radeon line of graphics cards, the FireGL line had several differences over the Radeon line aimed at multimedia entertainment, and are as follows:

The FireGL line is designed for multimedia content creation programs such as 3ds Max and CAD programs such as Solidworks, whereas their Radeon counterparts are suited towards video games, since professional software suites such as 3ds Max and Maya rely more on the Vertex processors of the cards, instead of the pixel pipelines and texture mapping units used by other 3d software, such as games[citation needed]. FireGL cards, on the other hand, support antialiased points and lines (unlike FSAA in Radeon cards, antialiasing only applies to the points and lines), quad-buffered stereo, two-sided lighting, Hardware-accelerated clip planes (example of 6 supported for FireGL X3-256), dedicated overlay planes buffer which Maya benefits from this.

Though, it is not known that the "features" mentioned above present only on FireGL cards or being disabled via the drivers for Radeon products. The FireGL drivers were also built with maximum image quality and pixel precision in mind. However, because the drivers are also based on the Catalyst drivers made for the Radeon line, it also makes them suitable for casual gaming, at the expense of probable compatibility issues with the very latest games due to the age of the drivers (they were not released monthly as the Catalyst driver suite did), with FireGL cards in theory push more data than their Radeon gaming counterparts.

You can of course softmod them, or change the bios, and the card might be treated as a FireGL, but AFAIK there are some features that the Radeon line is not even capable of if softmodded..

I know that on the NVIDIA side there was some special fog usage, and things like double sided polys only available on the Quadro cards.

But he'll have to make sure that his programmes are designed to actually make use of the additional features, and that they are really worth it, as it are very few, and in my opinion mostly useless features that he'll pay up to 10x times the price of a usual card for..

[thideras]

Thanks for the information, I've always wondered what the differences were between the two lines :beer:

[deathman20]

Depends on what the guy uses for programs... Get a list and we can see and determine if its even needed.

Alot of people say get a Workstation card right away for these applications and even a high end gaming card will do it just fine and CHEAPER than even the lowest of end FireGL cards that cost an arm and a leg.

With saying that I have a Mobility X1600 for my laptop here at work. I use AutoCAD, Solidworks, XSI, Blender, 3D Studio Max, have used Maya and will be using ProE in the future probley. Yes theres some benifits to having a FireGL card, I've modded this one before to use the FireGL drivers. Did I see a difference, yes one feature was unlocked in Solidworks. Was it worth it? No I saw the exact same performance, in benchmarks well it would compete with my X1900XT at the time very nicely.

Conclusion and still think so unless the Workstation helps with actual rendering an actual picture not realtime data, its not worth it. I mean our work spends 1.5-2 Grand on Workstation GPU's and I just shake my head. I've asked the IT Department why do they even use them when something 1/4 of the price would do the work just as well since no one uses the features that even our department uses and its not even worth it. Really your paying for driver support with the card, and I understand this but gaming cards can do EXACTLY the same work, if you can deal with a little sluggnishish sometimes then theres no issue.

I've said it before and will say it again, if my lowly Mobile X1600 can handle 5-10 Million Poly scenes with decent realtime frame rate, surely a higher end mobile gaming card can do much better than something that costs 2-3x the price.