ATI Fire GL4: The BMW of graphic cards. All images courtesy of ATI.

It's hard to ignore the raw power factor of an $1,800 graphics card. Even in this day and age of fast 3D gaming cards (like the GeForce 4 and Radeon 8500) that are capable of high frame-rates and beautiful effects, there is still nothing quite like a hardcore, workstation-class graphics card. The ATI Fire GL4 is just such a board. What it lacks in bells and whistles, it makes up for in pure polygon crunching horsepower.

The Fire GL series has a bit of a convoluted history. The original Fire GLs came from Diamond Multimedia. This company was bought by S3, who later became SONICblue. Finally, the Fire GL division was bought by Canadian graphics powerhouse ATI. Through all of this, the Fire GL development group has remained in Germany, where its engineers continue to push the highest end of OpenGL graphics.

Installation
Much like the Wildcat II we reviewed in November 2001, the Fire GL4 is a high-wattage monster of a board. It utilizes the AGP Pro50 slot of a high-end motherboard in order to draw maximum power and bandwidth. In order to keep things cool, as well as avoid conflicts with the neighboring PCI slot, this card takes the space of two normal add-in cards.

Installation under Windows 2000 was painless. After downloading the latest drivers from ATI's Website, I uninstalled my existing card. Next, I removed the plastic spacer that resides in the AGP slot when using a non-AGP Pro50 card. Then, I snapped in the Fire GL, rebooted the machine and ran the ATI driver executable. The drivers added a custom display driver for 3dsmax 4, as well as advanced display settings for Windows.

Once installed, opening the ATI display panel gives you access to preset OpenGL configurations for most 3D software packages. Just select your application from a dropdown list and go. If you prefer to fine tune things, there are myriad of options for OpenGL customization, dual monitor setup, gamma correction, Direct3D settings and more. In the resolution settings, you'll find that this card will drive the largest of monitors beautifully, while maintaining a high refresh rate.