AMD FirePro graphics

[dgallup]

So my MIS guy came around today and said he has extra money in his budget & can slip in a new workstation for me this year. I was looking at the these claims for the AMD FirePro graphics and was wondering if anyone had some first hand experience.

http://fireprographics.com/creo/

http://fireprographics.com/resources/creo/Creo_OIT_white_paper_041112.pdf

I used to be a fan of AMD many years ago but then there was a period when they were buggy and not worth considering. They seem very price competitive these days if there are not bugs. We are on WF4 now but plan on moving to Creo2 soon.

I'm considering the 4GB AMD FirePro W700, it's about the same price as a 2GB nVidia Quadro 4000.

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[Jewison]

Hey Gallup,

I don't have any first hand experience with the newest FirePro cards, but some with the older AMD graphics cards and a quite a bit with the new Quadro cards (we have about 20 computers in our office all running Quadro 4000 cards)

The guy in the office that used to do some renderings had a FirePro and he occasionally had graphics issues, and when we switched to new computers with 4000's he seemed to have fewer problems. However, rendering is not exactly the same as CAD work.

Another thing to consider is that if you check out the OCUS benchmarks, which gives a (more) *realistic* benchmark for CAD users and hardware, the top computers almost always run Quadro cards (my personal computer is the #3 computer running WF5 )

Overall I'd recommend the Quadro 4000 (I have it and like it a lot) but if you do try the new FirePro card let us know how it works.

~J

 

[robertib]

If you are looking into changing the graphics cards for creo, think again. PTC will not give you any reasonable support unless the graphics card is in a specific workstation.

We had a problem here, where we have computers that were spec'd for Wildfire, but were not on PTC's approved list for Creo, so they kept saying that since the hardware wasn't supported, that was the problem.
Fortunately, we had 1 machine that was on the list, so PTC had to accept that there was a genuine problem with the software, instead of complaining that we weren't using supported hardware.

 

[dgallup]

No problem with PTC support, both the 4GB AMD FirePro W700 and the 2GB nVidia Quadro 4000 are on the supported graphics list for the machine I'm looking at. In fact there are 5 quadro's and 5 firePro's on the list.

So NOBODY has used a FirePro yet?

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The Help for this program was created in Windows Help format, which depends on a feature that isn't included in this version of Windows.