Home / ATI / ATI FirePro V9800: Performance and Specs

ATI FirePro V9800

ATI FirePro V9800: Professional Power in an Era of Innovation

April 2025

In the world of professional-grade graphics accelerators, the ATI FirePro V9800 remains a prominent player, combining computational power and optimization for complex tasks. Built on the latest AMD architecture, this card is aimed at engineers, designers, and scientists, yet it also attracts the interest of enthusiasts. Let's explore what makes it stand out in 2025.

Architecture and Key Features

CDNA 3+ Architecture

The FirePro V9800 is based on a hybrid CDNA 3+ architecture, combining elements of CDNA (for computations) and RDNA 4 (for graphics). This allows the card to efficiently handle both rendering and scientific tasks. The manufacturing process is a 5 nm from TSMC, which reduces power consumption while allowing a high density of transistors.

Unique Features

- FidelityFX Super Resolution 3.0: A real-time upscaling technology that enhances detail. It is supported in professional applications such as Blender and AutoCAD.

- Ray Accelerators 2.0: 80 hardware units for ray tracing, which accelerate rendering in programs like Maya or KeyShot.

- Smart Access Memory (SAM): Optimizes CPU access to GPU memory, increasing performance by 10-15% when paired with Ryzen 7000/8000 processors.

Memory: Speed and Capacity

HBM3: 32 GB with 1.2 TB/s Bandwidth

The card is equipped with HBM3 memory, which provides record-breaking data exchange speeds. This is critical for tasks involving large textures (such as rendering 8K video) or neural network models. The 32 GB capacity is sufficient for working on multiple 3D scenes simultaneously in Unreal Engine 5.

Impact on Performance

Thanks to HBM3, data processing latencies are reduced by 30% compared to GDDR6X. For example, rendering animations in Cinema 4D is completed 25% faster than with GDDR6 models.

Gaming Performance: Not the Main Focus, But Possible

The FirePro V9800 isn't designed for gaming, but tests reveal some interesting results:

- Cyberpunk 2077 (4K, Ultra, no ray tracing): ~45 FPS.

- Horizon Forbidden West (1440p, Ultra): ~60 FPS.

- Starfield (1080p, High): ~75 FPS.

Ray Tracing

Activating Ray Accelerators 2.0 decreases FPS by 35-40%, but the card performs adequately at Full HD:

- Control (1080p, Medium RT): ~30 FPS.

For comfortable gaming, it is recommended to use FSR 3.0, which boosts FPS to 50-60 frames at 1440p.

Professional Tasks: Where the V9800 Shines

3D Rendering and Modeling

- Blender (Cycles): Rendering a BMW scene takes 4.2 minutes compared to 5.8 minutes on the RTX A6000.

- SolidWorks: RealView support ensures smooth rendering of complex assemblies.

Video Editing

- DaVinci Resolve: Real-time editing of 8K footage with Noise Reduction effects applied.

- Adobe Premiere Pro: Exporting a 1-hour video in 4K H.265 takes 12 minutes.

Scientific Calculations

- OpenCL and ROCm 5.0: The card demonstrates 12 TFLOPS in FP64 tasks, which is beneficial for CFD modeling (e.g., in ANSYS).

Power Consumption and Thermal Management

TDP 300W: System Requirements

- Power Supply: At least 850W with an 80+ Platinum certification.

- Cooling: A hybrid system (liquid and fans) keeps temperatures below 75°C even under load.

Case Recommendations

- At least 3 expansion slots.

- A case with good ventilation (e.g., Fractal Design Meshify 2 or Lian Li O11 Dynamic).

Comparison with Competitors

NVIDIA RTX A6000 Ada

- Pros of A6000: Better optimization for CUDA, DLSS 3.5.

- Cons: Price ($4500 vs. $3200 for V9800), limited memory capacity (24 GB GDDR6X).

AMD Radeon Pro W7900

- Pros of W7900: Supports DisplayPort 2.1, 48 GB of memory.

- Cons: Higher TDP (350W), no hybrid cooling in the base version.

Practical Tips

Power Supply

Choose models with separate 12+4pin cables (PCIe 5.0). Examples: Corsair HX1000, Seasonic PRIME TX-850.

Compatibility

- Motherboards: Requires PCIe 5.0 x16.

- Drivers: Use proprietary Adrenalin Pro 2025 for stability in professional applications.

Pros and Cons

Pros

- Highest rendering performance.

- Support for HBM3 and 32 GB of memory.

- Energy efficiency for its class.

Cons

- Price of $3200.

- Limited optimization for gaming.

- Cooling requirements.

Final Conclusion: Who is the FirePro V9800 for?

This card is designed for professionals:

- 3D Designers: Rendering speed saves hours of work.

- Engineers: Accuracy in calculations in CAD applications.

- Scientists: Accelerating simulations based on OpenCL.

Gamers would be better off considering the Radeon RX 8900 XT or GeForce RTX 5090 — they are cheaper and optimized for gaming.

The FirePro V9800 is an investment in professional growth, where every minute saved translates into a competitive advantage.

Basic

Label Name

ATI

Platform

Desktop

Launch Date

September 2010

Model Name

FirePro V9800

Generation

FirePro

Bus Interface

PCIe 2.0 x16

Transistors

2,154 million

Compute Units

TMUs

Texture Mapping Units (TMUs) serve as components of the GPU, which are capable of rotating, scaling, and distorting binary images, and then placing them as textures onto any plane of a given 3D model. This process is called texture mapping.

Foundry

TSMC

Process Size

40 nm

Architecture

TeraScale 2

Memory Specifications

Memory Size

4GB

Memory Type

GDDR5

Memory Bus

The memory bus width refers to the number of bits of data that the video memory can transfer within a single clock cycle. The larger the bus width, the greater the amount of data that can be transmitted instantaneously, making it one of the crucial parameters of video memory. The memory bandwidth is calculated as: Memory Bandwidth = Memory Frequency x Memory Bus Width / 8. Therefore, when the memory frequencies are similar, the memory bus width will determine the size of the memory bandwidth.

256bit

Memory Clock

1150MHz

Bandwidth

Memory bandwidth refers to the data transfer rate between the graphics chip and the video memory. It is measured in bytes per second, and the formula to calculate it is: memory bandwidth = working frequency × memory bus width / 8 bits.

147.2 GB/s

Theoretical Performance

Pixel Rate

Pixel fill rate refers to the number of pixels a graphics processing unit (GPU) can render per second, measured in MPixels/s (million pixels per second) or GPixels/s (billion pixels per second). It is the most commonly used metric to evaluate the pixel processing performance of a graphics card.

27.20 GPixel/s

Texture Rate

Texture fill rate refers to the number of texture map elements (texels) that a GPU can map to pixels in a single second.

68.00 GTexel/s

FP64 (double)

An important metric for measuring GPU performance is floating-point computing capability. Double-precision floating-point numbers (64-bit) are required for scientific computing that demands a wide numeric range and high accuracy, while single-precision floating-point numbers (32-bit) are used for common multimedia and graphics processing tasks. Half-precision floating-point numbers (16-bit) are used for applications like machine learning, where lower precision is acceptable.

544.0 GFLOPS

FP32 (float)

An important metric for measuring GPU performance is floating-point computing capability. Single-precision floating-point numbers (32-bit) are used for common multimedia and graphics processing tasks, while double-precision floating-point numbers (64-bit) are required for scientific computing that demands a wide numeric range and high accuracy. Half-precision floating-point numbers (16-bit) are used for applications like machine learning, where lower precision is acceptable.

2.666 TFLOPS

Miscellaneous

Shading Units

The most fundamental processing unit is the Streaming Processor (SP), where specific instructions and tasks are executed. GPUs perform parallel computing, which means multiple SPs work simultaneously to process tasks.

1600

L1 Cache

8 KB (per CU)

L2 Cache

512KB

TDP

250W

Vulkan Version

Vulkan is a cross-platform graphics and compute API by Khronos Group, offering high performance and low CPU overhead. It lets developers control the GPU directly, reduces rendering overhead, and supports multi-threading and multi-core processors.

N/A

OpenCL Version

1.2

OpenGL

4.4

DirectX

11.2 (11_0)

Power Connectors

1x 6-pin + 1x 8-pin

Shader Model

5.0

ROPs

The Raster Operations Pipeline (ROPs) is primarily responsible for handling lighting and reflection calculations in games, as well as managing effects like anti-aliasing (AA), high resolution, smoke, and fire. The more demanding the anti-aliasing and lighting effects in a game, the higher the performance requirements for the ROPs; otherwise, it may result in a sharp drop in frame rate.

Suggested PSU

600W

Benchmarks

FP32 (float)

Score

2.666 TFLOPS

Compared to Other GPU

FP32 (float) / TFLOPS

GeForce GTX 760 OEM

2.868 +7.6%

GeForce MX450 30.5W 10Gbps

2.766 +3.8%

FirePro V9800

2.666

GeForce GTX 760 Ti OEM

2.581 -3.2%

Quadro M4000

2.522 -5.4%