AMD FirePro W8000 And W9000 Review: GCN Goes Pro
AMD’s GCN architecture, known for its strong compute and 3D performance, is finally being made available in the company's FirePro workstation graphics card family. Can AMD catch Nvidia? We test the two fastest FirePro cards to answer that question.
Basemark CL: General Benchmarks
Simulation Benchmarks
The simulation benchmarks demonstrate that, once more, AMD’s drivers aren’t where they need to be in certain applications, this synthetic measurement being one of them.
AMD’s FirePro W-series cards do beat the company's older cards, but they can’t touch Nvidia’s Quadros. Even though they come close in the Julia Rendering benchmark, they don’t look good in the Mandelbulb Rendering test, and get massively beaten in the Fluid Operations and Wave Simulation metrics.
Fluid Operations
Wave Simulation
Julia Rendering
Mandelbulb Rendering
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mayankleoboy1 Typical of AMD : releasing cards without proper drivers.Reply
I bet most professionals wont touch these cards until atleast 3-4 driver revisions. These cards are newer, and perform worse than competitions older. -
mayankleoboy1 1.How does the CPU performance affect the benchmarks ? IOW, are these softwares enough offloaded on to the GPU, that changing the CPU to a much better Intel Xeons wont affect the performance much ?Reply
2. Also, how do the consumer cards perform on these pro softwares ?
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rdc85 They are new architecture, it's kinda expected result. I can see there a room for improvement, but without the application that can take advantage of it, then it will useless..Reply
in the end I'm glad to see that AMD graphic section is trying to make an effort, not like the their proc section.. -
bystander mayankleoboy1Typical of AMD : releasing cards without proper drivers.I bet most professionals wont touch these cards until atleast 3-4 driver revisions. These cards are newer, and perform worse than competitions older.Did you not read all the benchmarks? In many of the benchmarks it beat out Nvidia's offering by a lot, some were even, some were worse. And they are cheaper than the those Nvidia cards it would seem by the price offering of 4.2k for the Quadro 6000 right on the last page, compared to 4k for the W9000 and 1.6k for the W8000.Reply
So depending on what you use it for, it may very well be a great choice. -
Please note that dozens of software companies (all the most prevalent in DCC and CAD) have thoroughly tested and certified the drivers for the W8000 and W9000 cards. This means that users of these applications should not be concerned about driver stability or user experience.Reply
Yes, this is a brand new architecture and yes, performance improvements will continue to be made with subsequent driver optimizations.
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ohim Even though no one will prolly ever play games on a workstation, this are the first cards to have equal or superior gaming performance over the consumer cards also. Wonder if taking a HD 7970 and possibly mooding the bios for a FirePro one how will it impact the workstation benchmarks.Reply -
mayankleoboy1 ohimEven though no one will prolly ever play games on a workstation, this are the first cards to have equal or superior gaming performance over the consumer cards also. Wonder if taking a HD 7970 and possibly mooding the bios for a FirePro one how will it impact the workstation benchmarks.Reply
AFAIK, its not possible now to BIOS mod a regular 7970 into a W9000. AMD and Nvidia have become smarter.