AMD Ships Ultra High End Card, ATI FirePro V9800

Last month, just as Siggraph 2010 got underway, NVIDIA unleashed a series of Fermi-class Quadro cards. Now, a month later, it’s AMD‘s turn. With 4 GB frame buffer memory, ATI FirePro V9800 has twice the memory capacity of its predecessor V8800 with 2 GB, released five months ago in April. Whereas V8800 was described as “high end,” AMD characterized V9800 as “ultra high end.”

Initially, AMD planned to sell V9800 for $2,499, but shortly before its release, the company decided its listed price should be $3,499. That’s significantly more than its predecessor V8800, listed for $1,499. However, in benchmark test results AMD provided, V9800 appears to offer similar performance to V8800’s. In fact, in CINEBENCH 11.5 (based on usage of MAXON’s Cinema 4D animation software), V8800 seems to outperform V9800 by a small margin.

At $3,499, AMD’s V9800 costs more than its rival NVIDIA’s Quadro 5000 ($2,249, 2.5 GB memory), but less than Quadro 6000 ($4,999, 6 GB memory).

In single precision processing, V9800 is said to reach 2.72 Teraflops. Its predecessor V8800 reached 2.64 Teraflops. V9800 supports up to six display ports through AMD’s Eyefinity setup, allowing you to run programs on multiple monitors. It’s powered by 1600 stream processors, with support for DirectX 11, OpenGL 4.0, and ShaderModel 5.

Even though it has become common knowledge that AMD eventually plans to phase out its ATI brand (just the brand, not the product line), V9800 still carries the familiar ATI logo.