Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has launched its latest professional graphics card in retail - the FirePro V4900 - which targets the entry level of professional graphics workstations. The price is said to be around $190.00. The specs are fairly impressive as well. AMD's FirePro V4900 has 1GB of 128-bit GDDR5 RAM that drives memory bandwidth of 64 GB/s. It's not the most powerful of AMD's FirePro units, but it is priced to move, and will come as the default graphics card in certain Dell, HP, and Fujitsu workstations.

Here are the specs...

Stream Processors: 480

Memory Interface: 128-bit

Memory Size/Type: 1GB GDDR5

Bandwidth: 64.0 GB/s

DisplayPort: 2 Standard

Dual-link DVI: 1

Max Resolution: 2560x1600 @ 60Hz

Max Power: <75 W

Slots: 1

Form Factor: Full Height / Half Length

Bus Interface: PCI Express 2.1 x16

Supports DirectX 11.0, OpenGL, OpenCL3, AMD Eyefinity

Shader Model: 5.0

OS Support: Microsoft Windows 7, XP, Vista, Linux (32-bit or 64-bit)

In AMD's most recent earnings call last week, President and CEO Rory P. Read cited the consistent business coming from the company's graphics division.

"AMD's graphics segment continued to be a solid business for us," Read said. "Segment revenue was up 10% quarter-over-quarter and up 4% year-over-year. This growth was driven largely by strong seasonal revenue increases in the AIB channel. Our AMD Radeon HD GPU was also recognized as the world's fastest mobile product in the most recent quarter. This continues to show outstanding graphics innovation from AMD. We also publicly demonstrated our next-generation 28 nanometer GPU product during the third quarter, and we look forward to building on our performance leadership position in the graphics area throughout 2012 and the years ahead."

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At work we use Dell Precision workstations which includes AMD FirePro graphics cards.

Expensive card, and all we use our computers for is Visual Studio.

Waste.