Most gamers will have never used or maybe even heard of brands like Quadro or FirePro; instead names like GeForce and Radeon permeate through the air during our graphics card reviews.

But make no mistake, to both NVIDIA and AMD, these higher end brands that constitute the workstation class graphics market are as critical, if not more so, than the consumer cards they are often spawned from. If gamers’ buying decisions often influence casual PC users purchasing then workstation class users are often setting the stage for the ultra high end consumer.

AMD’s FirePro brand has had a tough goal recently – to gain ground in a market where NVIDIA has traditionally dominated with Quadro graphics cards. The AMD FirePro brand (it was previously called the FireGL series of cards) has been making in-roads on that goal in the last few years with the release of the RV770 architecture that was more commonly known as the Radeon HD 4000 series of cards for the consumer. That GPU was powerful, efficient and offered unique features that at the the time NVIDIA couldn’t match. And again, AMD seems to have hit the nail on the head with the Evergreen series of GPUs first released last September as it is another powerful yet power efficient GPU that developers and designers could get behind.

(…)

• READ MORE (Source): PC Perspective – AMD FirePro V8800 Review – Evergreen and Cypress Go Pro