AMD Launches FirePro Workstation GPUs

In an attempt to help fill out their workstation line-up a little better, AMD has just launched a brand-new series, called FirePro. Both the V3700 and V5700 cards are designed to give consumers a better choice, because as it was before, there was an $800 gap between the smallest card offered and the next-step up.

The V3700 becomes the least expensive GPU on the market, at $99, and is based on the RV620 chip, according to Ars Technica. Despite being a budget card, it still has respectable specs, such as 15.2GB/s bandwidth, 10-bit color support and 40 shader units. This GPU will in no way compare to the other cards in the line-up, but is a good solution for those on an extreme budget.

The V5700 fills the gap between the V3600 and V7600, which is where the $800 variance once occurred. This new card carries an SRP of $599, features 512MB of GDDR along with a 128-bit interface. The shaders are greatly increased to 120, while bandwidth also see a small bump, of 16GB/s. If one thing is for sure, it’s that AMD should have released these long ago, but at least now their line-up is a lot more robust.

Stats on the budget-model V3700 are quite modest, but the card’s $99 price point makes it the cheapest professional 3D solution on the market; even the G84-derived Quadro FX 370 is $119 over at NewEgg. It’s impossible to draw any meaningful performance data out of what we know thus far—AMD’s benchmark results show its winning, natch, and performance characteristics in 2D are very different from what we’d expect in 3D.