AMD’s ATI division on Monday announced the first 3D workstation card with an included DisplayPort connection. Workstation graphics from AMD appear to have an edge over its green rivals pretty much since the FireGL team in Germany came out with a next-gen driver for R600-based cards. The strategy to offer more memory and better OpenGL performance at alower cost has started to bear fruits.

Based on the same core GPU architecture that powers the Radeon 3850 and Radeon 3870 graphics chips, the ATI FireGL v7700 can be compared against its in-house competition here. It includes 512 Mbytes of on-board memory.

The 7700 is priced at $1099, which compares to street prices of about $800 - $900 for the 3700 and $1400 - 1500 for the 4600 version.

VIA