ATI Announces New FireGL Card

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Following on from ATI’s recent launch of a new range of PCI Express based FireGL cards, the Canadian company has announced the new AGP based FireGL X3-256.

The card is optimised for CAD applications such as Softimage and other high-end Digital Content Creation (DCC), Computer-Assisted-Design (CAD), Pre-Visualization and Geographic-Information-Systems (GIS) applications. ATI claims that the X3-256 offers a 30 per cent increase in performance over previous FireGL products.

It might seem odd to be releasing AGP based cards now that PCI Express has arrived, but it does make a lot of sense considering the huge installed base of AGP based professional workstation systems out there. The new card enables Workstation users to enjoy a large performance boost without having to invest in an entirely new system.

As its name suggests the X3-256 features 256MB of memory, made up of the latest GDDR3 modules and a wide 256-bit interface. It’s also features a 12-pixel pipeline architecture and full 128-bit floating point precision. In addition the X3-256 offers Dual-DVI connections and one of these provides Dual-link support. This means that you can use the card to support a super high resolution screen such as the VP2290b.

ATI offers full driver support for DirectX 9 and OpenGL. The X3-256 will be available late August through resellers and will have a suggested retail price of $1,099. More information about the new card is available here.

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