Time to get serious: 3D content creation and the ATI FirePro V8750

Bobby Miller 16 Oct, 2009 at 2:11pm ET Article published in Tech

The V8750 annihilates the 8800 GTX in Maya.

Once again the FirePro pulls far ahead of the GeForce.

And the same scenario repeats itself once more.

Final thoughts

For anyone in the 3D content creation business, the V8750 is a wonderful piece of hardware. After years of working with standard desktop-level hardware, the opportunity to try a professional piece of gear that is designed for my line of work has been an absolute treat. The V8750 exceeded my expectations and made my 3D workflow much easier. The fact that it removed most of my paranoia about losing production time on simple changes makes the hardware worthwhile in my book. This is the kind of technology that truly enables artists and professionals to create more by making the most of their time.

So, is the FirePro V8750 worth the price? That depends on who you are and what you do. If you are a serious 3D artist or a professional, it makes perfect sense; the V8750 pulls effortlessly pulls its weight and dramatically improves your workflow. For the gamer/artist, you can get by, but don’t expect miracles if you are a serious stickler for game performance. Then again, if you are serious about 3D work, the tradeoff is easily worth the premium.

I fought with the decision of moving to a workstation GPU for years because I was afraid that the performance yields would not justify the investment. Having now spent a good amount of time with the FirePro V8750, I can say without doubt that I wish I had adopted one years ago. If you’re fighting with that very decision, it’s time to make up your mind. Stop what you’re doing and make the leap to a workstation GPU. Your productivity will thank you.

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Comments

16 Oct 2009 ~ 2:25pm primesuspect I did not understand the real difference between workstation and desktop GPUs until I read this. Thank you for the education.
16 Oct 2009 ~ 2:42pm AlexDeGruven I'm with Prime on this one. When someone says 'realtime rendering performance', we think about the top-end gaming cards, because that's what they specialize in. But they approach it in a completely different manner than a pro card.

Great stuff.
17 Oct 2009 ~ 11:05pm Komete Thank you for this review. Every time I'm working on a design and things start to lag I think about workstation cards. I can't afford the one you reviewed but I may do good picking up a used one off of ebay froma generation or 2 ago.

Do you think it would be possible to run one workstation video card and one regular video card for gaming in the same system?
18 Oct 2009 ~ 11:06am AlexDeGruven

Komete wrote:

Thank you for this review. Every time I'm working on a design and things start to lag I think about workstation cards. I can't afford the one you reviewed but I may do good picking up a used one off of ebay froma generation or 2 ago.

Do you think it would be possible to run one workstation video card and one regular video card for gaming in the same system?

If you're running VIsta, you shouldn't have a problem as long as they can utilize the same driver.

In 7, you should have no problem at all, as it allows you to use different drivers for different cards, even between manufacturers (i.e. You could run an ATi workstation card, and an nVidia gaming card)
18 Oct 2009 ~ 2:07pm UPSLynx Komete - Alex is pretty much right. From my own experience:

While reviewing the FirePro v8750, I was still using my NVIDIA 8800GTX to play games. The v8750 could game, but the 8800GTX still have better performance, especially in higher end games. I would regularly swap out the hardware with both drivers installed without any problems. Shut the PC down, swap GPUs, boot, and get to it.

The only annoying bit is that the ATI FirePro driver popped up a dialogue box at every boot with the 8800GTX saying 'FirePro not found, Catalyst control center confused, wtf' and I'd have to click OK to continue.

The cheaper workstation GPUs will certainly get the job done. The v8750 is the cream of ATI's GPU crop, currently they do not offer a faster solution. They do offer many solutions from low to mid to high ranges in the Workforce GPU market. So if you have an eye on a different model, I'd certainly recommend you go for it, especially if you do a lot of graphics work.
29 Oct 2009 ~ 10:02am photodude I've debated the v8750 and the ATI Radeon HD 5870; the 5870 gaming card doubles the stream processors of the firepro v8750 800 vs 1600. but there are few who benchmark the gaming cards on workflow applications so hardware specs alone are not good to make the decision. I have also debated the nvidia quadro fx line since many say nvidia writes better divers the really max out performance.

Thanks for providing one set of benchmarks of a gaming card vs a workstation card. that goes a long way to helping make a decision based in realistic facts.
29 Oct 2009 ~ 10:27am Thrax Thanks for stopping by to comment, Walt! I'm glad that you brought that up, because we have some good news for you:

We recently added a Radeon HD 5870 to our test bench, so we can add that card as reference benchmark in future reviews. We've also struck a new relationship with NVIDIA, which means we will soon be adding Quadro benchmarks as well.

We've got some great workstation stuff in the pipeline, and we're going to approach it just like we did in this review.
29 Oct 2009 ~ 2:26pm primesuspect Walt: as Thrax mentioned, we have a 5870 here. If you'd like, I will run the 5870 through the suite of benchmarks that Bobby ran the 8750 through so you can have hard data.
29 Oct 2009 ~ 3:05pm photodude Primesuspect: That would be great. It would be great to see some hard data on the ATI Radeon HD 5870 and the Nvidia GTX 295 compared to the V8750. I think I should really illustrate the difference with the consumer cards vs the pro workstation cards.

Thrax: I look forward to seeing the QuardoFX benchmarks.

I'll also mention that no one is benchmarking with Adobe CS4 products or Autodesk Revit products. I work in Photoshop and my wife works in Revit-MEP 2010 it would be great to see how these cards line up in those programs.

Note: Revit is replacing Autocad for Architecture and related disciplines. Each revit product behaves differently and uses resources differently, justifying a need to benchmark each revit product.

Thanks again for the great review, I look forward to seeing the future reviews.
9 Feb 2010 ~ 11:56pm JG plz forward ,e the link with the radeon 5870 benchmark v.s v8750 (joffgorin@gmail.com)

thx
10 Feb 2010 ~ 12:58am UPSLynx JG: http://tech.icrontic.com/articles/perspective-the-radeon-hd-5870-vs-the-firepro-v8750