AMD took advantage of the SIGGRAPH, which is currently taking place in San Diego, to launch five new FireGL cards. Based on the RV630 and R600, they support DirectX 10 and OpenGL 2.1. While the press release mentions a gain in performances of more than 300% compared to the previous generation, we should remember that currently the most powerful FireGL, the V7350, is based on the aging R520, which also equips the Radeon X1800.
One of the main innovations that AMD highlights is a software improvement called, AutoDetect, which involves the possibility to dynamically load profiles present in the driver specific to each application. This allows the user to avoid setting all parameters manually and permits applying individual optimizations when several applications are used simultaneously.
Curiously, only the V8600 and V8650 support High Performance Stream Computing and therefore we wonder if AMD decided to limit the access to the GPU as a calculation unit to these cards only. This is contrary to Nvidia who allows using CUDA on all GeForce 8 and Quadro/Tesla derived cards. Either way on paper, the V8650s have what it takes to compete with the
Quadro FX 5600. However, the latter were launched five months earlier and up until now Nvidia has entirely dominated a professional market which is more conservative than the one for hardcore gamers.
FireGL V8600 
