Dual slot Radeon Pro W7700 graphics card plugs a gap in AMD’s Radeon Pro 7000 Series
AMD has introduced the Radeon Pro W7700, a new addition to its Radeon Pro 7000 Series of professional workstation GPUs. It is being billed as the most powerful pro GPU for under $1,000.
The new GPU comes with 16 GB of GDDR6 memory and boasts 32 TFLOPs of peak single precision performance. This is only a little bit shy of the 35.66 TFLOPs on offer in the Radeon Pro W6800, the flagship pro GPU from AMD’s previous generation.
The Radeon Pro W7700 is a full height, dual slot graphics card designed to fit in standard desktop tower workstations. With a total board power of 190W it requires an 8-pin power connector.
The Radeon Pro W7700 features 48 unified RDNA 3 compute units, each of which has 64 dual issue stream processors, two AI accelerators and a second gen ray tracing (RT) accelerator. According to AMD, RDNA 3 offers up to 50% more raytracing performance per compute unit than the previous generation.
The card sports four DisplayPort 2.1 connectors, the latest version of the digital display standard. According to AMD, this means the cards are future proofed for next gen displays in terms of refresh rate, pixel resolution and colour bit-depth.
What AEC Magazine thinks
This feels like a very important addition to AMD’s Radeon Pro 7000 Series of professional workstation GPUs. With 16 GB of GDDR6 memory, it plugs a gap that existed between the 8 GB Radeon Pro W7600 and 32 GB Radeon Pro W7800.
8 GB is only really sufficient for entry-level design visualisation workflows. With 16 GB, the Radeon Pro W7700 should be much better equipped to handle larger datasets, higher resolutions, and multi-application workflows – Revit and Twinmotion, for example.
AMD’s assertion that it is the most powerful pro GPU for under $1,000, only really puts it up against the Nvidia RTX A2000, which is based on Nvidia’s older generation Ampere architecture.
Nvidia’s latest ‘Ada Generation’ GPUs start at $1,250 and the AMD Radeon Pro W7700’s main competitor is likely to be the Nvidia RTX 4000 Ada Generation, which is single slot, has a TDP of 130W and comes with 20 GB of GDDR6 memory.
