The Red Dominator Marches Onwards.

Over the last 5 months we have seen a succession of ATI FireGL cards romp out the starter’s gate and each one crossing the finishing line streaks ahead of its competitor.   Each card has been very impressive at every point and the few we have pitched head to head against the NVIDIA Quadro’s have completely destroyed the competition.

Although this would seem initially a tricky market sector to fill, it’s actually very easy as many multimedia cards are now coming fitted with the magical number of 1GB of memory.    Therefore it does make sense for the professional studios to have professional cards of similar standing when designing games.   But it does not stop there!   This card fills an important price bracket point which allows the struggling SoHo artist or keen home enthusiast to easily reach without overstretching the budget.   Furthermore gaining substantial amounts of power they could never have dreamed about.

Today is an exclusive first outing of this card to be seen around the world.   It will be a swift article as time really does march upon us here as the demand for these new cards is huge and we do not get enough time to complete all that you would like to see!   Though as always the results that will be shown will be precise and to the point allowing you the individual to draw that ever so important conclusion deciding upon which is the best choice for you!

Todays exclusive first has the golden opportunity of putting to bed the answers and questions that have been firing about the community for so long.   How fast is it?  How does it perform overall in price point performance?   Does it come anywhere near the performance of the King of the Throne, the FireGL V8650!    These answers will become all too abundantly clear further on within this article.

Before we move on, lets firstly take a swift look at a few of the key functionality points of the new FireGL V8600.

With these facts completed, lets have a swift look at the V8600 in the flesh over on page 2.

Page 1 - Introduction
Page 2 - FireGL V8600 in the Flesh
Page 3 - System Configuration and Software Used
Page 4 - SPECviewperf® 10.0  run_all Threads 1280 X 1024
Page 5 - SPECviewperf® 10.0 run_all Threads 1600 x 1200
Page 6 - SPECviewperf® 10.0  run_all FSAA 1280 X 1024
Page 7 - SPECviewperf® 10.0  run_all FSAA 1600 X 1200
Page 8 - SPECviewperf® 10.0  run_all 1280 X 1024
Page 9 - SPECviewperf® 10.0  run_all 1600 X 1200
Page 10 - Conclusions