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AMD FirePro W8000 And W9000 Review: GCN Goes Pro

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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.

AutoCAD 2013: 3D Performance

AMD FirePro W-Series And The Overall Performance Index

Cadalyst Systems Benchmark 2012 provides both task-specific metrics and an overall performance index. The performance index weighs performance on different tasks to try to get as close as possible to a real-world workload.

Both AMD FirePro W-series cards lose the task-specific benchmarks, but lead the overall 3D performance index, beating Nvidia’s offerings and the older AMD cards. Apparently, the company's drivers are mature enough to do well in these tasks.

68 Comments Comment from the forums
  • mayankleoboy1 13 August 2012 12:19
    Typical 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.
    Reply
  • mayankleoboy1 13 August 2012 12:23
    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 ?

    2. Also, how do the consumer cards perform on these pro softwares ?
    Reply
  • rdc85 13 August 2012 12:27
    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..

    in the end I'm glad to see that AMD graphic section is trying to make an effort, not like the their proc section..
    Reply
  • 13 August 2012 12:36
    My impression is that on average, Nvidia higher quality. IMHO of course
    Reply
  • bystander 13 August 2012 13:35
    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.

    So depending on what you use it for, it may very well be a great choice.
    Reply
  • 13 August 2012 13:57
    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.

    Yes, this is a brand new architecture and yes, performance improvements will continue to be made with subsequent driver optimizations.
    Reply
  • ohim 13 August 2012 14:30
    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
  • rmpumper 13 August 2012 14:58
    The review needs at least one gaming GPU as comparison.
    Reply
  • 13 August 2012 15:32
    I always wondered how well these cards would do with games, anyone an idea? :)
    Reply
  • mayankleoboy1 13 August 2012 16:14
    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.
    AFAIK, its not possible now to BIOS mod a regular 7970 into a W9000. AMD and Nvidia have become smarter.
    Reply