AMD FirePro W9100 Review: Hawaii Puts On Its Suit And Tie

By Igor Wallossek
published

AMD's Hawaii GPU makes its appearance in the workstation space as FirePro W9100. Does this $4000 card have what it takes to displace Nvidia's Quadro K6000, or is it a more conservative performer? We throw an exhaustive benchmark suite at it to find out.

Does FirePro W9100 Take The Workstation Graphics Crown?

If the purpose of your professional graphics quest is efficiency, AMD's FirePro W7000 is tough to beat. Really, the FirePro W9100's purpose is high performance in 3D and compute-heavy tasks. In those disciplines, the card does not definitively grab the crown from Nvidia's best effort. AMD's latest does, however, appear to be the most cost-effective way of getting close to the pinnacle of what's possible in the workstation world. Take our CAD and CAE, or multimedia and entertainment benchmarks, for example. In those applications, the FirePro W9100 is a perfect match.

As long as AMD enjoys continued success promoting OpenCL acceleration in professional applications, the company's FirePro family should continue claiming market share. Adding the Mac as a supported platform is a step in the right direction, even though the volume of Mac-compatible cards is still low.

4K Resolution and Connectivity Galore

The FirePro W9100 is the first (and currently only) card that can drive up to six 4K monitors at full resolution, even if that means stepping down to 30 Hz when more than three are connected. A massive 16 GB of fast GDDR5 memory is more than enough for anything that you can throw at it.

Cooling and Power Draw

One opportunity for improvement is an underwhelming thermal solution, which we've seen previously on AMD's desktop-oriented reference cards. By redesigning the cooler, some of the company's board partners have already demonstrated that Hawaii can be made to run at much lower temperatures than 92 °C. The challenge, of course, is that those gaming products start exhausting heat inside your chassis, and that just doesn't fly in the workstation world.

Instead, professional cards need to push thermal energy out from their I/O brackets. Nvidia does this successfully with its Quadro cards, and AMD should start following suit. The FirePro W9100's heat sink and fan undoubtedly sacrifice some of the board's performance potential, since Hawaii is known to perform best under optimal cooling.

Suggested List Price

AMD is showing some confidence in pricing its FirePro W9100 at $4000. Compared to the slower Quadro K5000 at $1800 and the faster Quadro K6000 at $5000, AMD isn't far off the mark, though. And in the end, the FirePro W9100 surfaces as a strong candidate for high-end workstation duty, particularly when your workload is well-suited to the GPU's strengths (and the driver team's priorities). 

How does the FirePro W9100 fare in our final analysis, then? The $4000 card's price tag is justified by excellent performance, versatility across mature professional segments and the latest workloads, and unmatched connectivity. You get a mix of speed in 3D tasks and general-purpose compute-intensive apps, or both at the same time.

It'll be interesting to see how many professionals dig deep for no-compromise speed in their performance-sensitive software. If the audience is out there, AMD's FirePro W9100 should help reclaim some of the company's workstation market share.

Igor Wallossek
16 Comments Comment from the forums
  • CodeMatias
    "Nvidia’s sub-par OpenCL implementation"

    Right... that's why in real-world functions (rather than "perfect" functions used in benchmarks) the nvidia cards are on par with or even better than the AMD ones... What the author fails to understand is that AMD is the one with sub-par implementation of OpenCL, since half the language is missing in their drivers (and why groups like Blender and Luxrender have to drop support for most things to have the kernel compile properly). Sure the half of the language that is there is fast, but it's like driving a three wheeled ferrari!
    Reply
  • Kekoh
    I'll be honest, I don't know anything about workstation graphics. I read this purely for knowledge. That being said, I can't help but pick up on the AMD bias in this article.
    Reply
  • sha7bot
    Amazing card, but I disagree with your thoughts on the price. Anyone in this segment will drop another 1k for NVIDIA's consistent reliability.

    If AMD wants to take more market share from NVIDIA, it needs to lower the pricing to appeal to a larger audience and when the IT team is convincing purchasing, 1k isn't much in the long run. They need to drop there price so it's hard to pass up.
    Reply
  • Shankovich
    A great card to be honest. I had one sent to me by AMD and I've been tinkering with it today to run CFD software, along with some CFD code. It really sped things up a lot! Though the drivers need work however.

    I only think AMD really needs to beef up that cooler. A triple slot perhaps? (make the blower two slots). That thermal ceiling is holding a lot back.
    Reply
  • Jarmen Kell
    with this performance the W9100 really has a great value, some tests feel's like driving a fast four wheeled fully opencl accelerated Mclaren F1,nice review.
    Reply
  • mapesdhs
    The picture is incomplete though without comparing to how the Quadro would
    perform when using its native CUDA for accelerating relevant tasks vs. the
    FirePro using its OpenCL, eg. After Effects. Testing everything using OpenCL
    is bound to show the FirePro in a more positive light. Indeed, based on the
    raw specs, the W9100 ought to be a lot quicker than it is for some of the tests
    (Igor, ask Chris about the AE CUDA test a friend of mine is preparing).

    Having said that, the large VRAM should make quite a difference for medical/GIS
    and defense imaging, but then we come back to driver reliability which is a huge
    issue for such markets (sha7bot is spot on in that regard).

    Ian.



    Reply
  • wekilledkenny
    WTH is "Drawed Objects"? Even a rudimentary spell-check can catch this.

    For an English irregular verb "to draw" the perfect tense is "drawn" (and the past is "drew").
    For an organization claiming to be professional enough to do a review of a professional grade GPU, simple things like that can take away a lot of credibility.
    Reply
  • Marcelo Viana
    The picture is incomplete though without comparing to how the Quadro would
    perform when using its native CUDA for accelerating relevant tasks vs. the
    FirePro using its OpenCL, eg. After Effects. Testing everything using OpenCL
    is bound to show the FirePro in a more positive light. Indeed, based on the
    raw specs, the W9100 ought to be a lot quicker than it is for some of the tests
    (Igor, ask Chris about the AE CUDA test a friend of mine is preparing).

    Having said that, the large VRAM should make quite a difference for medical/GIS
    and defense imaging, but then we come back to driver reliability which is a huge
    issue for such markets (sha7bot is spot on in that regard).

    Ian.



    Then put a box with 8 k6000(8 is the total of cards that the "Nvidia maximum" alow) against 4 w9100(4 is the total of cards that amd said that should put in one system).

    Do you think it is fair? From the point of view of a renderfarm owner perhaps, because he dont look at a card but at a solution. Also dont forget that he have to deal with the price(8 $5K($40,000) against 4 $4K($16,000)) maybe he find that the cheaper solution isn't the faster one but maybe faster enough.

    But here they put a card against a card. And for me the only way is openCL because it is open. You cant benchmark over a proprietary maner. You must use a tool that both contenders can read.
    And yes NVidia dont give a shit to openCL, and i understand why, but i dont think it's wise. time will tell.
    Reply
  • mapesdhs
    Marcelo Viana writes:
    > Then put a box with 8 k6000(8 is the total of cards that the "Nvidia maximum" alow) ...

    You'd need to use a PCIe splitter to do that. Some people do this for sure, eg. the guy
    at the top of the Arion table is using seven Titans, but PCIe splitters are expensive, though
    they do offer excellent scalability, in theory up to as many as 56 GPUs per system using
    8-way splitters on a 7-slot mbd such as an Asrock X79 Extreme11 or relevant server board.


    > Do you think it is fair? ...

    Different people would have varying opinions. Some might say the comparison should be based on a fixed
    cost basis, others on power consumption or TCO, others on the number of cards, others might say 1 vs. 1
    of the best from each vendor. Since uses vary, an array of comparisons can be useful. I value all data points.
    Your phrasing suggests I would like to see a test that artifically makes the NVIDIA card look better, which is
    nonsense. Rather, atm, there is a glaring lack of real data about how well the same NVIDIA card can run a
    particular app which supports both OpenCL and CUDA; if the CUDA performance from such a card is not
    sufficiently better than the OpenCL performance for running the same task, then cost/power differences
    or other issues vs. AMD cards could mean an AMD solution is more favourable, but without the data one
    cannot know for sure. Your preferred scope is narrow to the point of useless in making a proper
    purchasing decision.


    > But here they put a card against a card. And for me the only way is openCL because it is open. ...

    That's ludicrous. Nobody with an NVIDIA card running After Effects would use OpenCL for GPU acceleration.


    > ... You must use a tool that both contenders can read.

    Wrong. What matters are the apps people are running. Some of them only use OpenCL, in which case
    sure, run OpenCL tests on both cards, I have no problem with that. But where an NVIDIA card can offer
    CUDA to a user for an application then that comparison should be included aswell. To not do so is highly
    misleading.

    Otherwise, what you're saying is that if you were running AE with a bunch of NVIDIA cards then
    you'd try to force them to employ OpenCL, a notion I don't believe for a microsecond.

    Now for the apps covered here, I don't know which of them (if any) can make use of CUDA
    (my research has been mainly with AE so far), but if any of them can, then CUDA-based
    results for the relevant NVIDIA cards should be included, otherwise the results are not a
    true picture of available performance to the user.

    Atm I'm running my own tests with a K5000, two 6000s, 4000, 2000 and various gamer cards,
    exploring CPU/RAM bottlenecks.


    Btw, renderfarms are still generally CPU-based, because GPUs have a long way to go before they can
    cope with the memory demands of complex scene renders for motion pictures. A friend at SPI told me one
    frame can involve as much as 500GB of data, which is fed across their renderfarm via a 10GB/sec SAN. In
    this regard, GPU acceleration of rendering is more applicable to small scale work with lesser data/RAM
    demands, not for large productions (latency in GPU clusters is a major issue for rendering). The one
    exception to this might be to use a shared memory system such as an SGI UV 2 in which latency is no
    longer a factor even with a lot of GPUs installed, and at the same time one gains from high CPU/RAM
    availability, assuming the available OS platform is suitable (though such systems are expensive).

    Ian.

    Reply
  • Marcelo Viana
    good answer mapesdhs, and i agree with almost everything you posted, but yet i think you didn't got what i meant to explain in my replay.
    You saying that the point of view must be based on software people use. Of course i'll make my decision to or not to buy a card on the software i use. I totally agree with you on that (if it's what you mean), but benchmark is another, completely different thing.

    "You must use a tool that both contenders can read." isn't a wrong statement. My thing is render so i'll keep on that: I-Ray is a software to render on GPU, but use only cuda (unable to do this benchmark) VRay-RT is another software that can render on cuda and on openCL (still unable to do this benchmark unless you use openCL only).
    If you gonna benchmark not the cards, but this two software ok, you can use a Nvidia card and benchmark this two software on cuda, and even that the card can read cuda and openCL, you must not use openCL, because one of the contenders(I-Ray) cannot read openCL.
    In other way if you decide to use the software VRay-RT you can use a Nvidia card and benchmark using cuda and openCL to see what is better, but you can't use AMD card on that.

    Perhaps, outside of benchmark world of course i can use Nvidia card, AMD card, I-Ray, Vray-RT, whatever i want. But on this review they do benchmark to compare two cards for god's sake.
    Benchmark means: a software common to contenders to judge this contenders.

    I hope you understand the meaning of my post this time.
    In time: i understood your point of view and i agree with that, except benchmark.
    Reply