3D Professor, also known to this world as a man with longest signature in a mail (excluding ones that come with non-disclosure contract as big as Nvidia's) got his hands on AMD's latest baby, ATI FireGL V7600, based on R630 GPU. This chip is a full-R600 with half a memory controller, ie. a 256-bit wide one. However, this did not stop the 320 scalar units in the GPU giving Nvidia a serious pounding, especially in Maya. Seeing over 50 per cent performance difference from a 500 quid part was something that we estimated could happen, but it should not have happened. Now, it seems that ATI has a real racer in store.
i can attest to how ridiculously lucrative this market is.i was once asked to configure two machines for the steupiddd linux guys in engineering, needed to be a windows platform for them to do their models on so no stupid matrox and they were last as too wat to buy for a windows machine.They were suggesting oxygen and quadro cards in excess of 1200 usdi was like wtf!!!no no no no linux NABS!!! let me configure the damn thing.i ordered two nvidia cards, and soft modded them to quadrosat a FRACTION of the price of the quadrosdid the benchmarks and perf tests and the softmodded cards scored maybe 20 points less than their 1200+ usd breadrens.then of course the linux boys started acting up spewing some archaic code garbage at me and i was like watever nabstime to get with the program and enter the 21st centurynabs.