Workstation Graphics: 19 Cards Tested In SPECviewperf 12

By Igor Wallossek
published

SPECviewperf 12 sets out to be the standard for evaluating workstation graphics cards by including the latest professional applications, more complex models, and synthetic workloads pulled from important market segments. We test 19 cards in the new suite.

Energy

This benchmark simulates a typical volume rendering application, which is used for geophysical surveys (think seismology, along with oil and natural gas exploration) and medical imaging. During the surveys, 2D images are combined to form volumetric representations, creating 2D and 3D views that can further analyzed and evaluated.

The energy-01 viewset takes advantage of hardware support for 3D textures and the associated trilinear interpolation, which in turn depends on a lot of fast graphics memory. In fact, there's a large-res test that employs a 3.2 GB dataset. Cards with less than 4 GB of RAM can't complete it. This explains why some of our lower-end boards perform so badly.

In the following table, you can see how the seven workloads are weighted. AMD's FirePro W7000 once again serves as our example.

Swipe to scroll horizontally
BenchmarksWeight in %FPS
Test 1

14.0010.13Test 2

14.009.80Test 3

14.005.03Test 4

14.002.55Test 5

14.002.95Test 6

15.000.54Test 7

15.000.55Weighted Geometric Mean = 2.64

Igor Wallossek
43 Comments Comment from the forums
  • spp85
    AMD FirePro now a days performs very good at a cheaper price. Good job AMD. Keep on improving that.
    When AMD releases the mighty 16GB FirePro 9100 based on Radeon R9-290X core will be competitive to the Quadro K6000 in performance.
    Reply
  • ykki
    Waiting for the W9100 benchmarks and oh lord (AMD) let it be good! :)

    Reply
  • FormatC
    I've also reviewed the FirePro W9100 in a large article with a lot of real-world benchmarks (the review was published last week in German). But AMD is really funny: the W9100 launch was at 7th, the R9 295X2 at 8th... So we got not time enough to translate it faster or merge the results. It's a shame :(
    Reply
  • Shankovich
    Can't wait for the W9100 benchmarks! Getting one sent to me but oh man I still want to see some results :D
    Reply
  • PepitoTV
    I would've loved to see Titan benchmarks included as that card is often named as a 'poor man' workstation card...
    Reply
  • bobcramblitt
    Thanks for this. Would love to see some future benchmarking of workstation-level systems using the new SPEC workstation benchmark (SPECwpc V1.0 -- http://www.spec.org/gwpg/wpc.static/wpcv1info.html). But, then again, I'm a SPEC guy...
    Reply
  • edhap
    Hey SPEC guy, when can we do away with synthetic benchmarks for the workstation market? Hopefully VP12 is the last of these and you can focus on real applications. The last thing I need is another benchmark that does not match real world use cases

    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.
    Reply
  • adamglick
    Fortunately, VP12 is MUCH MUCH closer to an actual (non-biased) representation of real-world application performance than was VP11. Yes, it's still "synthetic" but it uses actual code traces from updated versions of real applications -and its results are typically in-line with actual application testing results.

    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
    Reply
  • adamglick
    *It is a shame Tom's did not include the results of the latest AMD FirePro 9100 card. They do actually have this card for eval and testing in house and It's a mystery to me why they chose not to include the results here.

    tsk tsk tsk
    Reply
  • filippi
    It was a great review. thanks a lot!

    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.
    Reply