The Hawaii-based Radeon R9 290X's strong performance has us really looking forward to an upcoming FirePro product built on the same GPU, even if Nvidia's Quadro K6000 is clearly faster. Don't expect to substitute a Radeon into your professional workflow, though. AMD's Catalyst drivers aren't certified for any of these applications, so you'd be missing some of the workstation card's features. Then again, for what it's worth, the Catalyst package works a lot better in CATIA than Nvidia's GeForce driver.
Moving on to the benchmark results...
The FirePro W5000 and Quadro K2000 (as well as the FirePro W7000 and Quadro K4000) are on about even footing when it comes to price. The same can’t be said for their respective performance, though. AMD's FirePro W5000 manages to slide past Nvidia's Quadro K4000, which is almost twice as expensive. Similarly, the FirePro W7000 is only defeated by the Quadro K5000, which costs more than two times as much.

- Introducing Our Benchmark System
- CATIA V6 R2012
- Results: CATIA V6 R2012
- Creo 2
- Results: Creo 2
- Energy
- Results: Energy
- Maya 2013
- Results: Maya 2013
- Medical
- Results: Medical
- Showcase 2013
- Results: Showcase 2013
- Siemens NX 8.0
- Results: Siemens NX 8.0
- SolidWorks 2013
- Results: SolidWorks 2013
- CPU Scaling
- Image Quality And Desktop Drivers
- SPECviewperf 12: A Much-Needed And Welcome Update
When AMD releases the mighty 16GB FirePro 9100 based on Radeon R9-290X core will be competitive to the Quadro K6000 in performance.
I find that internal benchmarking the only way to really understand the value of workstation cards. W7000 for example - it was awesome in our internal testing. While good, the cards is much better than these benchmark results suggest. Not sure why I would look at another SPEC benchmark when I will still need to test the cards in-house to really know how good they are for our applications and models.
Unfortunately, testing in the real applications (using something like APCapc) requires actual licenses of the software apps. Many of these vendors (CATIA, NX, etc) simply don't make temp licenses available for reviewers/journalists or other non-users.
VP12 should be quite good enough to help make informed evaluations of GPU hardware. If you are concerned about seeing in-application performance measurements for particular apps, you can ususually find the data with a bit of googling, although take results you find posted on the internet by "regular Joe's" with a grain of salt.
Adam Glick
Sapphire Technologies
tsk tsk tsk
About CPU Scaling: "In the second set of our scaling results, only SolidWorks responds to CPU frequency. Core and thread count don't make a difference.¨
This is not entirely true. It goes as far as 10% at 4.5 GHz.
I find that internal benchmarking the only way to really understand the value of workstation cards. W7000 for example - it was awesome in our internal testing. While good, the cards is much better than these benchmark results suggest. Not sure why I would look at another SPEC benchmark when I will still need to test the cards in-house to really know how good they are for our applications and models.
tsk tsk tsk
It is so problematic to read the posts above too? I wrote:
And for your information: AMD (Sapphire included) was not able to send me a R9 295X2 to my lab here in Germany! So I had to wait for Chris' card (yes, we've paid 550 bucks only for FedEx Priority from U.S. to Germany) and I was so lucky to handle two launch articles at the same time. The day has 24 hrs only, sorry for my laziness.
You get the complete W9100 story (the updated SPECviewperf12 is only a part of this) on 17 pages, don't worry, but it must be translated first.
Titan is good for compute, the SPECviewperf12 is more graphics related. No chance for consumer cards.
"Don't bother with anything else because Nvidia K6000 is the fastest."
You see the results of the consumer cards inside? The Titan is a little bit slower than the tested GTX 780 Ti, the Titan Black is in such cases 2-3% faster. But both are slower than a 780 Ti OC and the results of this card are in the most cases absolutelly worthles. I've tested the consumer cards belong the workstion graphics only for demonstration purposes.
But it really makes no sense to run pro-apps with non-certified hardware and drivers!
A better question is this. The 780 TI OC is faster than a titan black? And are these tests with the normal 780 TI driver? If so for working not he road a 780 ti rig will do the job.