Hollywood is intense. Today, you can go see a film like District 9 or Transformers 2 and be awed by the computer generated visual effects–imagery that mimics the nuances of reality to an unbelievable degree–and not even realize the minute details going in to the production of a shot or, more importantly, the astounding hardware used to create those effects. Animation and VFX studios use impressive machines to bring these films to life. These artists are not relying on Radeon and GeForce GPUs to render their work. No, they pull in the big guns–the workstation boards–to do the heavy lifting.
The workstation GPU market is vastly different than the desktop GPU market, despite radically similar hardware configurations. ATI and NVIDIA both offer workstation solutions, named the FirePro and Quadro lines, respectively. The drivers set these units apart from their desktop gaming-centric cousins. These graphics cards are fine-tuned and optimized to work exceedingly well in 3D and graphics packages, such as Autodesk Maya, Softimage, and 3D Studio Max. They are built with the professional artist in mind, not the high-end gamer and, as a result, the target audience of a workstation board is radically different.
I/O ports on the V8750.
Studios today deal with intense graphics production pipelines. Any and all rendering time is valuable, and costs money. These artists don’t need machines that can render a low polygon scene with pixel shader effects at 60+ frames per second. What they need are machines with hardware that can supplement viewport performance in applications, calculate incredibly complex object physics, and render out an image with thousands of elements, anti-aliasing, shader effects, applied simulations, ray tracing, and whatever else the shot calls for, and it needs to do all of this really, really fast.
The case for workstation hardware
This is an industry where a simple change brought on by a director or supervisor can mean adjusting a few numbers or keyframes in seconds, and then waiting minutes, hours, or even days for the output just to see if the changes were appropriate. In this industry, every second of production counts, and artists rely on hardware that can do more with less time.
From a production standpoint, the more operations that can be completed in–or close to–real time, the better. There are even some 3D packages, such as Studio GPU’s Mach Studio Pro, that are designed to operate entirely in real-time, and are very dependent on the GPU. Applications like this give high-end workstation boards a home.
To understand why it’s beneficial to use a workstation GPU, you first need to understand how they differ from their desktop cousins: It’s all in the presentation. In gaming, many effects and techniques are “cheated.” A desktop card may skip the rendering of certain shaders or textures if they are not critical to the player’s eye, and they may even approximate output in some conditions. This is done because high framerates and performance are preferred when playing a game. Workstation graphics cards use different firmware and drivers which assure that nothing is cheated; rendering operations are complete and thorough. This difference improves rendering quality at the expense of speed. When working in a 3D application, this trade greatly improves productivity and performance.
The following clip from the 2009 ACM SIGGRAPH conference explains the value of workstation hardware to studios. AMD SVP and GM Rick Bergman spoke to the attendees about FirePro technology and how ATI graphics enhance Hollywood productions. He went on to give examples of some real-time scene adjustments that are made in the production pipeline of an app like Mach Studio Pro. Bergman then went on to speak of a studio that now uses one high-end FirePro card to accomplish tasks that took eight GPUs just one year ago. That’s some serious horsepower.
As a 3D artist and avid gamer, I’ve had my eye on workstation GPUs for a long time. I always wondered what the fuss was about, and if the performance yields justified the higher price point. At SIGGRAPH, I spoke with John Swinimer and Janet Matsuda about the ATI FirePro line of hardware; I mentioned to them that I was disappointed with my 8800 GTX’s rendering performance in Windows 7. They offered to let Icrontic test drive the FirePro V8750 with complete confidence that their product would not only pick up the 8800’s slack, but also exceed my expectations in any 3D applications. I can now tell you that their confidence was well founded.
ATI's push for more OOMPH is intimidating.
ATI had a great presence on the SIGGRAPH 2009 show floor. They were showcasing their line of FirePro GPUs with the tagline “Get More Oomph.” The idea was that with FirePro adapters, you could get more “oomph” out of your workflow and applications. To visualize this idea, ATI had a world-champion sumo wrestler on the show floor. It was the perfect metaphor.
Specifications and test setup
The ATI FirePro V8750 is based on the 55nm RV770XT architecture that also lies at the heart of the Radeon HD 4870. It contains 800 Stream Processors, a 750MHz core clock, and 2GB of GDDR5 memory. It is currently the most powerful workstation GPU in ATI’s lineup. Here are the GPU’s specifications:
- AMD RV770XT GPU
- 55nm process node
- 750MHz core clock
- 800 Stream Processors
- 2GB 900MHz GDDR5
- 256-bit Memory Bus
- 115.2GBps memory Bandwidth
- Power: 2×6-pin PCIe
- 2 x DisplayPort, 1 x DL-DVI Outputs
- Stereoscopic (3D) Output
- Crossfire 2.0-compatible
- Supports DirectX 10.1 (Pixel Shader 4.1)
- MSRP: $1,799 USD
The testbench for our evaluation.
Evaluating the experience
My first instinct with this card installed was to fire up Autodesk Softimage 7.5 and see how it handled some of the scenes that I have worked on within the last year. A year ago I animated a shot for a short film which involves a UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter buzzing past the camera and flying towards the city of Chicago. I opened this project to test the V8750 as I was very familiar with how my computer handled this scene. Render times were slightly improved–a 1080p render with all of the quality fixings took around nine minutes per frame. What really impressed me, though, was the application’s overall performance. I had blazing fast framerates in the viewports, even when showing four views. I could adjust the camera and scene assets with silky-smooth framerates. The complexity of this project used to bog down the viewport, but with the V8750 installed, any and all viewport manipulation was a breeze.
The FirePro V8750 making the rest of my hardware feel insignificant
The more I played around with my old scenes, the better the experience became. I could open a render preview window–which lets you draw a bounding box over a window to render that section–to check the scene, and whenever I made small adjustments, I’d have near real-time output.
Simulation calculations were equally impressive. When I opened a scene that had a large explosion with many complex rigid body simulations, the V8750 barely broke a sweat. In Softimage, as soon as I hit “play” to view a scene, it calculated all rigid body simulations at the point of initialization. When playing the timeline with the V8750 installed, calculations and rendering happened incredibly quickly. I had near real-time timeline scrubbing.
The overall impression I was given while using the V8750 was that I could accomplish so much more at this level of efficiency. While working on my short film, there were times when I was worried about missing a deadline; I would actually forgo changes as I knew they would cost me precious time. Fine-tuning lighting on a shot, for instance, would require attribute adjustments and then waiting for a render preview to complete before I could see if the adjustment even helped the shot. At crunch time, waiting for a test render was no longer an option.
In cases like this, my hardware was limiting my creativity. Hardware should never limit the artist. On the contrary, it should bolster creativity. A production pipeline armed with the FirePro V8750 works much more quickly and, as a result, allows the artist more time for creativity. This power given to an individual artist is incredibly helpful; when given to an entire studio, this power it works wonders.
Performance by the numbers
The scene used for Softimage tests
I ran the FirePro V8750 through a host of content creation benchmarks to stretch its legs. For reference, I also benched my NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX, a mid-range desktop GPU of the GeForce 8000 family that is frequently owned by gamers. The comparisons are hardly fair, but they do give a good indication of the vast performance difference between desktop and workstation GPUs.
Despite the incredible differences you will see on the next page, the V8750 actually lagged behind the GeForce 8800 GTX in gaming performance. I averaged 35-40 FPS in Team Fortress 2 with the FirePro V8750, while the GeForce 8800 GTX rarely dipped below 60 FPS at the same settings. PC gaming isn’t impossible on the FirePro V8750, but it certainly isn’t ideal, and it is hardly the task that this GPU was designed for.
On to the benchmarks!
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