ATI Introduces Ultra High End FirePro V9800 Graphics Card

As summer winds down, the professional graphics market, it appears, is just starting to heat up. About a month ago, we tested the Fermi based Quadro 6000 and 5000 graphics cards from NVIDIA. Although they were a few months late to the party, our results revealed the Quadro models held a measurable performance advantage over ATI's then flagship product, the FirePro V8800. But as expected, the red team has stepped their game up by offering a new workstation card that looks to close the gap while offering multi-monitor support that NVIDIA can't match currently.

The FirePro V9800 offers similar features found in the V8800 we reviewed in April : Cypress GPU, 1600 stream processors, 147.2 GB/s memory bandwidth. The difference here is a larger, 4GB memory buffer, six DisplayPort connections, and a higher price tag. At $3,499, it costs over twice as much as the V8800, targeting workstation users that demand the highest level of performance possible with no compromises. 

So how well does the V9800 stack up against the competition? Fortunately, we have it in the labs right now and will be putting it through our benchmark suite this week, along with other high end models from the FirePro line and the latest Quadro cards. Of course, a full review will be posted on HotHardware shortly so stay tuned.