Make use of quality cooling solutions, passive where possible

We all know the FireGL cards are gaming cards with a few switches flipped and the driver should justify the increadible price increase over their respective gaming counterparts. Strange thing is that many gaming cards can be bought with better or quieter cooling for a couple of bucks, while the FireGL cards only use the cheapest cooler that works.

So how about giving at least a little more value for money by equipping every FireGL card with a proper (at least comparable to the best available for gaming cards) cooling system, passive where possible. This would only add a few euro’s to a 500 euro card and would significantly increase customer satisfaction (due to, for instance, a quieter system and a better ‘quality feel’).

Develop OpenGL extension for targeting rendering to a specific GPU

Equalizer is a parallel OpenGL rendering API so you can divide up OpenGL tasks across multiple GPUs.  One or more rendering threads execute in parallel to the application thread so you can enable things like enormous video walls or multi-window rendering.

The Equalizer API lets you decompose the OpenGL calls and distribute some of the rendering tasks to GPU 1 and others to GPU 2 so you can get parallel processing. My understanding is that under Windows you need an OpenGL extension to do this.

Nvidia has a proprietary WGL_NV_gpu_affinity that lets you target OpenGL calls to a specific GPU. AMD needs to add a similar capability to the Catalyst drivers (or get the extension adopted as an ARB extension).  Parallel rendering using multiple GPUs will be a big deal for scalable and distributed applications.

Add Display Port across the entire line

Add Display Port support across the entire line of FireGL cards- not just the 7700. Display Port is a high performance, expandable (and physically small) solution. Presumable this would reduce costs for the card, and reduce monitor vendor costs as well. Maybe drop dual-link DVI and include converters from Display Port for legacy monitors?

Add HDMI 1.3 xvYCC color gamut support

Add support for HDMI-xvYCC color space under 10-bits. This is important for HD video content since xvYCC expands the color gamut by 1.8 times, covering 100% of the Munsell color standard.

Offer auto detection for DCC software, not just CAD

Auto-detection seems primarily focused on CAD software.  The card automatically adjust specs to give the best possible performance depending on the CAD application that is being used.  This same kind of auto-detect functionality could be expanded to more Digital Content Creation software (video and 3D modeling).  I know on the DCC side there is Auto-detect support for Maya, Lightwave 3D, Houdini and After Effects.  But what about Blender, SoftImage, Media Composer, Shake (under Linux) or any of the Autodesk finishing products?

Improve energy efficiency further

Given the high power consumption of the current accelerators, work on decreasing the energy consumption of the on-board systems and reducing the heat.  AMD seems pretty clever on this already by ganging together several smaller, less power hungry chips (vs having one big power guzzler) and focusing on fast GDDR4 memory to more than compensate for the reduced bit width. This is a great approach that could be extended further.  I’m not exactly sure what else AMD is doing, but anything to reduce powder consumption is highly valuable (we are trying to go completely solar, but the big power drain is my graphics computer!)

Upgradable memory

Why can’t there be a way to allow users to upgrade the RAM on the accelerator card itself?  So for example, the FireGL 8600 ships with 1 GB onboard RAM and a really fast bus. What would be great would be if there was a way for the user to add additional memory in an upgrade kit. So instead of having to buy a new card as I increase my model complexity, I can suffice by upgrading the RAM.