A whopping 2GB of onboard memory and self-adjusting software driver are two of the attractions of AMD's newest ATI FireGL workstation graphics accelerators. The five PCI Express x16 cards use the unified shader architecture ushered in by Microsoft's DirectX 10's Shader Model 4.0, with versatile stream processing units replacing separate vertex, pixel, and geometry shaders as required. All provide 128-bit full floating-point precision.

The lineup starts with FireGL V3600 ($299) and V5600 ($599) cards, equipped with 256MB and 512MB of memory, respectively. Each combines 120 shader processing units with a 128-bit ring bus memory controller interface, yielding memory bandwidth of 16GB/sec for the model V3600 and 35GB/sec for the FireGL V5600.

For $999, the midrange FireGL V7600 packs 320 stream processors, 512MB of DDR, and a 256-bit memory interface for 51GB/sec of bandwidth. Stepping up to the $1,899 FireGL V8600 brings the same 320 shading units plus 1GB of memory with a 512-bit interface for memory bandwidth of 128GB/sec. The flagship FireGL V8650 matches the V8600's specifications with the exception of 2GB of DDR4 on board; it's $2,799.