Introduction to the AMD FirePro™ V7900 Part II
DisplayPort 1.2
In early 2010, the DisplayPort 1.2 specification was ratified in VESA. This new revision of the display interface standard adds support for new features including high bit-rate audio, even higher bandwidth, and multi-streaming capabilities. Just as AMD was the first to integrate DisplayPort technology into professional GPUs with the ATI FirePro™ 2260, the AMD FirePro V7900 and V5900 integrate support for the new revision 1.2 of the standard. The table below is a simplified comparison of display interface capabilities integrated into these workstation professional graphics cards.
DisplayPort 1.2 supports up to twice the bandwidth of DisplayPort 1.1a. High Bit-rate 2 (HBR2) provides up to 5.4 Gbps/lane of bandwidth, or up to 21.6 Gbps in a full four-lane configuration. This lends itself very well to many applications that require ultra-high bandwidth.
New Anti-Aliasing technologies
Enhanced Quality Anti-Aliasing (EQAA) EQAA is a new anti-aliasing option available on the latest series of AMD FirePro™ professional graphics cards. This technique offers advanced smoothing of aliased edges without requiring additional video memory, and with a minimal performance cost. It offers enhanced quality over standard Multi-Sample Anti-Aliasing (MSAA) modes by doubling the number of coverage samples per pixel, while keeping the same number of colour/depth/stencil samples.
The new EQAA modes can be enabled by selecting the 2xEQ, 4xEQ, or 8xEQ modes that have been added to the anti-aliasing slider in the AMD Catalyst™ Control Center. EQAA is fully compatible with all other supported anti-aliasing techniques, including Adaptive AA, Super-Sample AA, Custom Filter AA (Edge-Detect), and Morphological AA.
Selecting the Enhanced Application Settings option from the drop-down box will cause applications that natively support MSAA modes to use equivalent EQAA modes instead.
Selecting the Override Application Settings option will force applications to use EQAA modes if they are selected on the slider; this setting will often work even if an application does not natively support anti-aliasing. The following table lists the number of color/depth/stencil and coverage samples used by the available MSAA and EQAA modes.
Morphological Filtering (MLAA)
The new morphological anti-aliasing technique works as a post process effect. In other words, we finish rendering each frame normally, but before presenting it to the display, we run it through another shader pass to perform the filtering. This differs from traditional multi-sample and super-sample AA techniques where the filtering occurs during the rendering of each frame. In fact, this technique can eliminate aliasing for still images, though it’s intended to work better when in motion. MLAA can be enabled via the “All 3D settings” tab within the AMD Catalyst™ Control Center. The filter works by first detecting high contrast edges with various pixel-sized patterns that are normally associated with aliasing, and assumes they should actually be straight lines that are not aligned to pixel edges. It then estimates the length and angle of the ideal line for each edge, and determines the proportional coverage by the lighter and darker color for each pixel along the edge. Finally, it uses this coverage information to blend the colors for each pixel.
Page 1 – Introduction
Page 2 – The V7900 Part I
Page 3 – The V7900 Part II
Page 4 – The Differences and Pictures
Page 5 – System Set-up and Software Used
Page 6 – SiSoftware Sandra 2011 Part I
Page 7 – SiSoftware Sandra 2011 Part II
Page 8 – Miscellaneous Professional Benchmarks
Page 9 – SPECviewperf® 11.0 and SPECapc’s
Page 10 – Conclusions and Award