ATI's current workstation-class 3D graphics accelerators - dubbed X1 - are the company's latest effort to keep a hand in the high-end 3D graphics market. Consumer-level 3D hardware is now massively powerful, of course, but for all-out 3D performance and rock-solid driver integration you need a card dedicated to the purpose, and ATI claims the X1-128 is it.

The X1 currently sits at the top of the FireGL range, which includes the Z1, 8800 and entry-level E1. The X1 is the only line in the range that consists of two cards, with both 128MB and 256MB versions, the designs differing in more than just the number of RAM chips on board. The X1-256 takes up two backplane spaces, while the 128 occupies only one. That said, the 128's cooling system is such that you'll likely be prevented from installing anything in the adjacent PCI slot, but this is the case with most high-end cards.
On the subject of cooling, the ATI card features a large and solid-looking heatsink and fan -- a necessity for dissipating all the thermal energy. Sitting in an AGP 4x or 8x slot, the card requires more power than can be provided through the bus, so in order to supply it with sufficient juice it comes with an additional power connector from your workstation's main PSU.

Based directly on the RADEON 9700 consumer card, the FireGL is nearly identical in appearance, with the exception of an extra daughterboard mounted towards the rear. Video output comes in the form of dual DVI-I sockets, allowing connection to two digital panels for optimum clarity. The card supports resolutions up to 1,920 x 1,200 digital and 2,048 x 1,536 VGA. Two DVI-A-to-VGA adaptors are supplied, allowing you to use dual CRTs, or one CRT and one LCD.

The 9700 GPU is a high-class device based on a 256-bit memory architecture with 128-bit floating-point precision running at 325MHz. The four geometry engines work in parallel to provide the polygon-shifting power, along with eight pixel-rendering pipelines to handle lighting and texturing, as well as any custom shaders and effects. Dual DACs run at 400MHz, but specs like this don't tell the whole story. The card's disparate subsystems need to work together as a unit and integrate with software to provide decent real-world performance.

In use, the X1 felt subjectively speedy. We used it with a number of high-end 3D apps including 3ds max, Maya, LightWave and Cinema 4D. Performance was smooth under all the apps, with no incompatibilities rearing their heads. Maya tends to be the one to catch out less well-designed drivers, especially when using Artisan, which projects brushes onto 3D surfaces, but it worked like a charm. The OpenGL performance felt great, but the texture memory is limited considering the kinds of competition the card is up against, notably the 3Dlabs Wildcat VP990 with its whopping 512MB of texture memory. Of course, the whole point of AGP is that the graphics card can access the main system memory at over 2GB/s if it needs to, but if it does the card won't be running at its best. However, it's only in pretty extreme preview situations - scenes containing huge numbers of texture maps - that you'll reach the limit of a card's RAM. If you know this will be likely, the X1-256 card will be a better option.

As well as OpenGL, this card accelerates DirectX 9.0, so if you take a break from 3D work you can relax with some serious gaming. Games performance is very good, as you'd expect, but this isn't the market intended for this card so it doesn't represent great value in this respect.

The days of $40,000 workstation cards with entirely custom-designed hardware are over, and with the X1 sporting exactly the same silicon as consumer-level gaming cards the differentiation stems from stable, application-specific driver support and, to a lesser extent, narrow performance optimisations. Gamers aren't interested in high-performance windowed 3D, for instance, and the only real reason OpenGL support is written into consumer-level drivers is to run the Quake and Doom III engines. ATI consequently puts a huge amount of effort into its driver software, and as a result it's generally rock solid and certified for over two dozen workstation apps. The drivers have decent colour control and software screen geometry controls too, allowing you to scale and position the screen on VGA monitors.

Benchmarking was carried out using SPECviewperf 7's ProE, UGS and 3ds max tests and, while the results were good, they weren't in the same class as the Quadro FX 2000 (October 2003, page 49), although this admittedly costs three times the price. The disparity in performance between the 3ds max, ProE and UGS tests, however, may well be a driver issue. Re-running the 3ds max test using ATI's specific driver configuration resulted in increasingly slower times, once again suggesting that the drivers, while expertly developed, still need work.

The X1-128 is a good card, but the near-total dominance of NVIDIA in the high-end market makes it a tough game for any competition. If you're after a well-designed 3D card with good application support at a competitive price, the X1 is worth consideration, but it's difficult to wholeheartedly recommend.