Siggraph

Suddenly it seems there’s a graphics card horserace again: At the show, ATI jumped back into the race with Nvidia, announcing two strong contenders in its pro line of graphics cards (Radeon is the consumer/gamer card line), the ATI FirePro V5700 and ATI FirePro V3700.

Also new: a re-branded name, from FireGL—the name kept from the purchase by ATI of the pro card line from a German graphics card manufacturer in 2001—to ATI FirePro.

For quite some time, ATI had made graphics cards that other manufacturers could take aim at as the best of the bunch. Most card makers dropped off though in the tough economics of that market, leaving Nvidia and ATI to challenge and leapfrog each other throughout the late 1990s and into the new millennium. Things got a little shaky after AMD’s purchase of ATI in 2006, however, with AMD’s troubles threatening to pull ATI down.

Now, the two manufacturers’ fortunes have see-sawed again. Nvidia has seen “weak [performance] driven by share loss and ASP pressure on desktop GPU” according to Wedbush Morgan analyst Patrick Wang, who believes the pressure on Nvidia’s bottom line won’t disappear anytime soon, especially “because of AMD’s/ATI’s strong product launches.”

For the second quarter of fiscal 2009, Nvidia recently reported a revenue decrease to $892.7 million compared to $935.3 million for the second quarter of fiscal 2008, a decrease of 5%.

The ATI FirePro V5700 graphics accelerator ($599) delivers increased performance for shader-intensive apps (up to two times more than the previous generation), 512MB of frame buffer memory, and dual link DVI and DisplayPort connections.

Its Unified Video Decoder 2.0 provides full Blu-ray feature support including dual-stream and picture in a picture (PIP) capabilities, and handles decoding of various formats in the GPU, which frees up the CPU to handle other tasks.

The ATI FirePro V3700 looks to be a bargin: its low entry price for pro 3D graphics is only $99, while still offering 256 MB of frame buffer memory, two dual-link DVI connectors, and VGA mode support.

Both cards, which employ PCI Express 2.0 interfaces, offer the latest firmware: Microsoft DirectX 10.1 and OpenGL 2.0 support, and Shader Model 4.1.