Also, they carry a lot more RAM than their consumer counterparts – which is actually very important, as I will discuss later on in this article. These days, most pro cards share hardware with their consumer counterparts, although the chips are usually hand-picked from the highest-quality parts of a production run. From a hardware standpoint, the answer is “not much” – certainly not as much as in the late 1990s and early 2000s when 3Dlabs and ELSA were building hardware specifically aimed at professional users. I’m often asked what the difference between desktop graphics accelerators and their professional counterparts is. It is targeted at graphics professionals who rely not only on speed, but rock-solid stability and support. The ATI FirePro series is part of AMD’s professional line, aimed at the high-end CAD and DCC markets. While there used to be several players in the latter category, including 3Dlabs, Matrox and ELSA, the industry is now dominated by two companies: AMD (following its acquisition of ATI) and Nvidia. The world of 3D GPUs has, since its inception, consisted of two main categories: the consumer cards (also known as the desktop sector, or gaming cards) and the professional products. Today, we are here to look at AMD’s current lineup of professional 3D graphics accelerators, the ATI Fire Pro series.
Some would even argue that it is a more powerful platform for 3D calculations than the CPU itself – but that’s a debate for another time. It has a central logic processor, its own memory banks and various I/O controllers, making it more like a miniature computer within a computer. The video card or Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) is one of the most complex pieces of hardware in modern PCs.
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