ATI, graphics business unit of Advanced Micro Devices, on Wednesday launched the world’s highest-performance professional graphics accelerator – ATI FirePro V8800 – that also boasts with the most advanced feature-set, including support for DirectX 11, OpenGL 4.0, Eyefinity and so on.

ATI FirePro V8800 graphics board is based on the Cypress GL XT graphics processing unit clocked at 825MHz with 1600 stream processors, has peak performance of 2.64TFLOPS in single precision math operations and 532GFLOPS in double precision math operations. The graphics board carries 2GB of 4.60GHz GDDR5 memory, four DisplayPort outputs, one stereo sync outputs and supports framelock/gunlock functionality, as well as for 10-bit per colour components.

According to AMD’s graphics unit, the FirePro V8800 is the most powerful professional graphics accelerator on the planet. Besides, the unit also supports DirectX 11 and OpenGL 4.0 (the driver that supports the latter is a non-WHQL certified beta version) capabilities, which makes it the world’s most feature-rich accelerator.

The new ATI FirePro V8800 graphics card can support output to up to four displays, which makes it ideal for usage by various professionals working in CAD, digital content creation (DCC), broadcast, medical imaging and financial services. Later this year the company will reveal another FirePro solution that will support output to up to six displays and will carry 4GB of GDDR5 memory.

“AMD is the undisputed consumer graphics leader and today we are bringing many of the same cutting edge innovations from our ATI Radeon HD 5000 series to the professional graphics market for the first time. The ATI FirePro V8800 with ATI Eyefinity multi-display technology effectively dissolves visual limitations for professionals,” said Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager of AMD products group.

Despite of remarkable horsepower, ATI FirePro V8800 is a relatively affordable graphics solution, it costs $1499. In order to make the solution successful, ATI has to ensure flawless work of its V8800 with leading-edge professional software. At present desktop professional graphics market is dominated by solutions from Nvidia Corp. and ATI will have to ensure broad infrastructure support to ensure the success of FirePro V8800.

“Our ecosystem has never been stronger as we are actively working with leading ISVs and OEMs on a global scale to offer unprecedented choice and advanced performance for handling today’s modern workloads. We are confident the latest family of ATI FirePro professional graphics brings new value to the workstation graphics market,” added Mr. Bergman.

Tags: ATI, Cypress, FirePro, OpenGL, DirectX, 40nm