Expert: Andrew Ransavage - 11/5/2010

Question
Hi

My name is Prasad from india. I want to know “ATI FIRE STREAM” cards are useful to DCC (Digital content creation works like maya, 3d, vue(e-0n) works mostly for “3D FRAMES RENDERING”.

What is the  main difference between  FIRE PRO & FIRE STREAM .  I am using maya,3d, VUE(e-on). VUe files taking much time in rendering time and hanging system most of the times also.

So these cards are useful to me or not?

I am using  AMD OPTERON DUAL PROCESSORS WORKSTATION WITH FIRE PRO  5800 1GB GRAPHIC CARD. 4GB RAM.



Please suggest your valuable openion and ideas regarding to my “3D APLICATION RENDERING”.
prasad

Answer
The FirePro is AMD's top end professional graphics card, the FireStream is an addon GPU that works in conjection with your video card to perform extra or offloaded processing.  At a minimum you need something like the FirePro or Nvidia's Quadro.  They both sell GPU's for additional video processing power for which AMD's is the Firestream.  Typically a good high end video card like the FirePro or Quadro is all you need for 3ds max or Maya...