AMD FirePro is AMD's brand for their graphics cards targeting the market of professional
engineers, designers, animators and scientists. The product line includes certified device
drivers to guarantee a stable and high performance workstation graphics environment on both Microsoft
Windows® and Linux® 32-bit and 64-bit operating systems.
The fields of occupation that the AMD FirePro products are being designed and certified
for include: Engineering and design, i.e. Computer-aided design, Computer-aided manufacturing,
Computer-aided engineering, and Finite element method flow visualization, Digital content
creation and Digital Media, Geographic Information System and Geovisualization, Oil and Gas Exploration
and also the Life sciences.
Supported software The AMD FirePro product line and AMD's device
driver for it, the AMD Catalyst, are advertised to officially support Autodesk 3ds Max, Autodesk
AutoCAD, Autodesk Inventor, Autodesk Maya, Dassault CATIA, Dassault SolidWorks, PTC Creo,
Siemens NX and many more. Multi-monitor set-ups are supported by AMD Eyefinity, one graphics
card can drive up to six monitors. Products
Multi-monitor support
AMD Eyefinity supports multi-monitor set-ups. One graphics card can drive up to a maximum
of six monitors, the supported number depends on the distinct product and the number of
DisplayPort displays. The device driver facilitates the configuration of diverse display group
modes. Differences with the Radeon Line
The FirePro line is designed for multimedia content creation programs, such as 3DS Max,
and mechanical engineering design software such as Solidworks, whereas Radeon counterparts
are suited towards video games. FirePro drivers were built with maximum image quality and
pixel precision, with CAD specific functionalities, such as the recently introduced AutoDetection
Technology to tune the parameters inside the driver to achieve maximum performance for
predefined list of software. However, because the drivers are also based on the Catalyst
drivers made for the Radeon line, it makes them suitable for gaming, at the expense of
probable compatibility issues with the very latest games, due to the age of the drivers,
with FirePro cards in theory pushing more data than their Radeon gaming counterparts.
Since the 2007 series, high-end and ultra-end FireGL/FirePro products have officially implemented
stream processing, which the Radeon line of video cards, although present in hardware,
did not offer any support until the HD 4000 series where beta level OpenCL 1.0 support
is offered, and the HD 5000 series and later, where full OpenCL 1.1 support is offered.
Heterogeneous System Architecture HSA is intended to facilitate the programming
for stream processing and/or GPGPU in combination with CPUs and DSPs. All models implementing
the Graphics Core Next microarchitecture support hardware features defined by the HSA Foundation
and AMD has provided corresponding software. Soft-mods
Because of the similarities between FireGL and Radeon cards, some users soft-mod their
Radeon cards by using third-party software or automated scripts accompanied with a modified
FireGL driver patch, to enable FireGL capabilities for their hardware, effectively getting a
cheaper, equivalent, FireGL cards, often with better OpenGL capabilities, but usually half
of the amount of video memory. Some variants can also be soft-modded to a FireStream stream
processor. The trend of soft-mods continued with the
2007 series FireGL cards, as follows:
History The FireGL line was originally developed by
the German company Spea Software AG until it was acquired by Diamond Multimedia in late
1995. The first FireGL board used the 3Dlabs GLINT 3D processor chip.
Deprecated brand names are ATI FireGL and ATI FirePro 3D.
See also Nvidia Quadro – Nvidia's competing workstation
graphics solution References
External links AMD FirePro™ Professional Graphics