ATI FirePro V8700

How It Compares

The ATI FirePro V8700 occupies the 50th percentile among all GPUs in the database, placing it squarely in the middle of the pack. This is a professional workstation card from AMD’s FirePro Terascale (Vx700) generation, built on the RV770 chip. With no nearest rivals listed in the benchmark data, its positioning must be understood through its architectural traits and raw compute figures rather than direct head-to-head comparisons. The card’s 50th percentile ranking indicates it outperforms roughly half of all recorded GPUs while trailing the other half, a reasonable standing for a 2008-era workstation part that has long since reached end-of-life status.

The V8700’s predecessor is the FireGL series, and its successor is the Radeon Pro GCN lineup. This places it at a transitional moment in AMD’s professional graphics history, bridging older fixed-function workstation designs and the later Graphics Core Next architecture. The card uses the TeraScale architecture, which was AMD’s unified shader design of that period, and it is fabricated on a 55 nm process at TSMC. The die contains 956 million transistors on a 256 mm² slice of silicon, yielding a transistor density of 3.7 million transistors per square millimeter, a figure that reflects the manufacturing capabilities of its era rather than modern standards.

Ray Tracing and Feature Set

The FirePro V8700 does not include dedicated ray tracing cores or tensor cores; both fields are null in the specification data. This is consistent with its 2008 release, predating hardware-accelerated ray tracing by more than a decade. The card’s API support is limited to DirectX 10.1 (shader model 10_1) and OpenGL 3.3, with no Vulkan support listed. For professional workloads of its time, this meant compatibility with DirectX 10-era applications and OpenGL 3.3-based CAD and DCC tools, but no path forward for modern graphics APIs.

The shading pipeline consists of 800 shading units, 40 texture mapping units, and 16 raster operation pipelines. These figures define the card’s parallel processing capability: the 800 shaders handle vertex and pixel work in a unified fashion, while the 40 TMUs and 16 ROPs manage texture filtering and pixel output. The pixel rate is 12.00 GPixel/s, and the texture rate is 30.00 GTexel/s. Floating-point performance is rated at 1,200.0 GFLOPS for FP32 operations, a substantial number for a workstation card of its generation, though FP16 and ray tracing capabilities are entirely absent. The card’s display outputs include one DVI port, two DisplayPort 1.0 connectors, and one S-Video output, enabling multi-monitor professional setups common in CAD and digital content creation environments.

Benchmark Performance

The benchmark data for the FirePro V8700 lists no individual scores and no nearest rivals, leaving the 50th percentile ranking and the average benchmark score of zero as the only quantitative performance indicators. The zero average score likely reflects the absence of standardized benchmark submissions rather than actual performance, making percentile comparisons the more meaningful metric. At the 50th percentile, the card sits at the median of the database’s GPU population, a position that suggests competent mid-range performance for its era, capable of handling professional workloads but not competing with high-end cards of its time.

Without rival scores or delta percentages, performance analysis must rely on the card’s raw specifications. The 1,200.0 GFLOPS FP32 throughput, combined with a 30.00 GTexel/s texture fill rate and 12.00 GPixel/s pixel fill rate, indicates a card designed for compute-heavy professional tasks rather than gaming. The 800 shading units provide substantial parallel processing headroom for OpenGL-based CAD applications, while the 16 ROPs limit pixel throughput relative to the shader count, a common trade-off in workstation cards that prioritize geometry and compute over fill-rate-heavy workloads. The 50th percentile standing suggests the V8700 delivers roughly median performance across all GPUs in the database, which for a 2008 workstation part is a credible result given the rapid advancement of GPU technology in subsequent years.

FAQ

Q: What is the manufacturing process for the ATI FirePro V8700?

A: The card is fabricated on a 55 nm process at TSMC, containing 956 million transistors on a 256 mm² die.

Q: Does the FirePro V8700 support hardware ray tracing?

A: No. The card has no ray tracing cores or tensor cores, and its API support is limited to DirectX 10.1 and OpenGL 3.3, with no Vulkan support.

Q: What is the FP32 performance of this card?

A: The FirePro V8700 delivers 1,200.0 GFLOPS of FP32 compute performance, alongside a pixel rate of 12.00 GPixel/s and a texture rate of 30.00 GTexel/s.

Q: How much memory does the FirePro V8700 have and what type is it?

A: It comes with 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory on a 256-bit bus, providing 108.8 GB/s of memory bandwidth.

Q: What is the power consumption and power connector requirement?

A: The card has a TDP of 151 W and requires two 6-pin power connectors, with a suggested power supply rating of 450 W.

Q: When was the FirePro V8700 released and what was its launch MSRP?

A: It was released on September 10, 2008, with a launch MSRP of 1,499 USD.

Memory Subsystem

The FirePro V8700 is equipped with 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory, a notable feature for a 2008 workstation card given that GDDR5 was just entering the mainstream market. The memory operates at 850 MHz, which translates to an effective data rate of 3.4 Gbps, and is connected via a 256-bit bus. This configuration yields a memory bandwidth of 108.8 GB/s, a figure that balances capacity and throughput for professional applications of its generation.

For high-resolution workloads, the 1024 MB capacity is a limiting factor by modern standards, but it was adequate for the display resolutions and texture sizes common in 2008-era CAD and DCC tools. The 256-bit bus width provides a solid foundation for memory bandwidth, and the GDDR5 type offers higher data rates per pin compared to the GDDR3 memory found in many contemporaries. The 108.8 GB/s bandwidth allows the 800 shading units to remain fed with data during compute-intensive operations, though the relatively small frame buffer means large textures or multi-display configurations could strain memory capacity. The dual DisplayPort 1.0 outputs support high-resolution monitors of the period, and the card’s dual-slot form factor with a 254 mm length and 111 mm height accommodates the memory and cooling infrastructure required for the 151 W TDP. The memory subsystem as a whole reflects a deliberate balance between capacity, bandwidth, and power consumption, prioritizing sustained throughput for professional rendering and simulation tasks over the raw capacity that would become common in later generations.