It has been ages since I seriously considered ATI video cards for the workstations that we purchase at Auer or that I purchase myself for my own personal computer systems. Nvidia Quadro cards have worked well and have not given us any grief in our systems. That has been the case up until the last year or so with SolidWorks.
Unfortunately, with SolidWorks 2008 and SolidWorks 2009 something has changed. The Nvidia graphics cards do not seem to be as rock solid as in the past. Is it the Nvidia drivers, the Windows operating systems; both XP and Vista, or SolidWorks? I do not know, but something is not right and we have been hearing plenty of issues with Nvidia video cards on the SolidWorks forums that I read daily.
My own personal experience has not been horribly bad, but I have had numerous annoying glitches with the Nvidia card in my Lenovo Thinkpad T61p and on my new Core i7 workstation. Screens locking up and not refreshing, not repainting the graphics window under dismissed dialog boxes and tearing of the graphics window when dragging sheet metal forming tools out of the design library.
All of these issues have lead me to want to take a look at the new ATI FirePro graphics cards that where introduced in the 2nd half of 2008.
The rub was I wanted to try out the new cards but was not willing to spend the dollars to purchase a FirePro without hearing of some good experiences by real SolidWorks users. The reviews in the various trade publications just were not good enough for me. Even with the FirePro getting some very good reviews.
Well as luck would have it ATI was looking to get some of their new graphics cards into the hands of some SolidWorks users and bloggers to try out and write about. Perfect, I would be able to take a good look at their cards and not have to fork out my own dollars to do a test.
I was able to get the FirePro V3750 and V5700 video cards to try out in my Core i7 workstation. The deal was I could have the cards for two weeks and then I would have to send them back to ATI. ATI paid for the shipping both ways.
My first impressions of the FirePro's when I pulled them out of their boxes was how heavy the cards were compared to my Nvidia FX570. Both of the FirePro's have huge copper heat sinks. They are about 2.5 times the size of the aluminum heat sink that comes on the FX570. Copper is not cheap and there is a lot of it in the FirePro's. It sure looks like overheating should never be an issue with the FirePro's, as long as the gpu fan is running.

From top to bottom, FirePro V3750, Nvidia FX570 and FirePro V5700
I got to work and set about installing the FirePro V5700 into my Core i7 machine. Specs for the workstation can be found in the posts I wrote a while back documenting the Core i7 workstation build. I am currently using a ViewSonic G810 CRT monitor set at 1600 x 1200 and a 70 Hz refresh rate.
After the card was installed I headed over to the SolidWorks website to get the latest approved graphics card driver for the ATI FirePro. Since I do not have an OEM system I looked for approved drivers under the ATI Technologies vendor drop down list. The 8.543 version driver was approved on 1/9/2009 for both graphics cards, SolidWorks 2008 & 2009 and the Windows Vista x64 OS that I run on my workstation. Cool that would make swapping the two video cards easy as I would not have to install new drivers for the two different cards.
Installing the drivers was easy. I installed the ATI drivers with all the options and keep the standard default settings for the cards. One nice thing about the ATI Catalyst Control Center is that you do not need to go in and set the graphics card driver software for the CAD program you want to use the gpu with like on the Nvidia cards. The driver software handles that for you and will adjust settings as required based on the software package you are working in. For those that are tweakers there is a whole range of settings you can play with to get your gpu to work to your liking. For me, and I am sure most users, the standard settings should work out of the box.
The first test I did was to see if both of the FirePro's would have any affect on any of my benchmarks tests. As expected, the new cards had no affect on the test results. The benchmarks I have are a real test of cpu performance as it relates to SolidWorks. See the right side bar for the benchmark file links.
From there I set about to using both cards just like I do for work with typical models I create everyday. I made sure to do some detail drawings and also work with PhotoView 360. I did not spend anytime trying out any of the numerous video tests that are out on the internet. Those test results are covered very well by the various hardware review sites. Tom's Hardware has several reviews of the various professional graphics cards on their website.
A problem I did discover was that I had the same annoying graphics glitches with the FirePro's as I had with the Nvidia cards. Screens locking up and not refreshing, not repainting the graphics window under dismissed dialog boxes and tearing of the graphics window when dragging sheet metal forming tools out of the design library.
What this did help to confirm for those of us with these graphics issues is that the gpu's are not the problem for this particular set of glitches. There is some interaction between SolidWorks and Windows Vista. This was confirmed a couple weeks ago by Ron Bates over on the SolidWorks forum, when he let the users know that one common thread with this set of problems was running Windows Vista with the Windows Aero interface disabled. http://forum.solidworks.com/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=134&threadid=20983&highlight_key=y
I am not a fan of Windows Aero but certainly have a system capable of running with it enabled so I immediately turned the Aero interface back on. What do you know the graphics glitches went away. This is a great tip that Ron shared with the user community and something that the programmers at SolidWorks can work on in future updates of the software.
So what is the bottom line after spending a few weeks with the ATI FirePro's? I liked the cards, they worked well with my system and are definitely on par with the offerings from Nvidia. This is very good for consumers in the workstation market. Healthy competition between Nvidia and ATI in the professional graphic card space should yield better performing graphics cards with some competition on pricing for the cards.
I will have no problem recommending SolidWorks users take a look at the ATI FirePro's and to consider them in their purchase decisions.
After returning the FirePro's to ATI, I went out and purchased my own FirePro V8700 from www.newegg.com. It has been installed in my Core i7 system for a week or so. In the near future I will be installing Windows 7 RC1 on my Core i7 with an OCZ Vertex SSD drive. I plan to do a review in the future of my setup with Windows 7 RC1 and SolidWorks. From the little bit I have worked with this set-up it looks very promising for Windows 7.
Cheers,
Anna
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