Wait a minute, didn't AMD take the ATI brand behind the shed and give it the Old Yeller treatment? Sort of. Barring a special edition throwback or a mulligan of sorts, you won't ever see a new graphics card in the home desktop market carrying an ATI label, but AMD is still using it for some of its professional cards, including the ATI FirePro V5800 DVI, one of two new graphics cards geared for the workplace (the other being the AMD FirePro 2270).

"Because of their superior power consumption and multi-dispaly capabilities, solutions based on the AMD FirePro 2270 and ATI FirePro V4800 DVI deliver strong value for financial, medical, and corporate workstation environments," said Janet Matsuda, general manager, AMD Professional Graphics. "With the AMD FirePro family, we continue to demonstrate our focus on enhancing productivity through an enhanced visual experience."

The AMD FirePro 2270 ( $150) is AMD's only low-profile, passively cooled, dual-display, triple set support solution graphics card, while the ATI FirePro V5800 DVI ($470) boasts added muscle to drive two high-resolution dual-link DVI displays. Both cards are available now.

Image Credit: AMD

The film Predators opened in theaters over the weekend, and as was the case with several other flicks proceed by Robert Rodriquez -- Shorts, Spy Kids 2: The Island of Lost Dreams, Spy Kids 3D: Game Over, Planet Terror, Sin City -- it was AMD hardware that brought the special effects to life.

In this case, Troublemaker Studios tapped into AMD's six-core Opteron processors and ATI FirePro graphics cards, and specifically the V8800 iteration. Representing the flagship GPU in the FirePro Vxxx line, the V8800 comes with 1600 stream processors, a 256-bit memory interface, 2GB of GDDR5, and all the modern standards you would expect, such as DirectX 11, OpenGL 3.2, and Shader Model 5.0.

Six digital artists comprised the core Predators production team. According to Charlie Boswell, AMD's Direct of Digital Media and Entertainment, the AMD-powered workstations allowed the Predators team to render scenes in real-time at resolutions of up to 4,096 x 2,160.

Gamers aren't the only ones graphics card makers have in their sights. Such is the case with AMD's new remote graphics option  -- the ATI FirePro RG220 -- which the company hopes will entice IT managers seeking to replace existing desktop workstations with energy-efficient thin-client solutions.

"Power consumption restrictions in crowded office buildings cause headaches for IT managers trying to find the right balance between energy efficiency, system performance and IT spend for the work environments they manage," said Janet Matsuda, senior director, Professional Graphics, AMD. "The ATI FirePro RG220 can be part of a secure, easy to manage solution, and is now available to enterprises that need to deploy updates to multiple users simultaneously, while still giving the end user the full PC experience they’re accustomed to."

AMD says the FirePro RG220 consumes only 35 watts under a full load. It comes with 512MB of on-board graphics memory and measures half the length of a standard PCI-E card, so IT admins can squeeze it into smaller systems and only take up a single slot within a server.