Radeon Pro WX 8200 excels at multi-tasking says AMD, laying strong foundation for GPU rendering
AMD has added a new high-performance, sub-$1,000 GPU to its Radeon Pro workstation line-up. The Radeon Pro WX 8200 is based on AMD’s Vega GPU architecture and is designed to accelerate a wide range of design visualisation workflows, including real-time visualisation, physically based rendering and VR. The card also features planned certifications for all of the leading 3D CAD packages.
AMD is pitching the Radeon Pro WX 8200 against the Nvidia Quadro P4000 and Quadro P5000, highlighting its performance advantage in a number of applications and benchmarks, including the GPU renderer AMD Radeon ProRender — which is available for PTC Creo, SolidWorks and others — and VRMark Cyan Room.
AMD also reckons the Radeon Pro WX 8200 is far superior to the Quadro P5000 at multi-tasking, stating that it is 13 times faster on average when running the SPECviewperf 13 3D graphics benchmark with the Blender Cycles GPU renderer running in the background. Driver stability is also being highlighted, with AMD referencing the findings of a recent report it commissioned from independent software quality assurance and testing firm QA consultants. The report, which tested a range of AMD Radeon/Radeon Pro and Nvidia GeForce/Quadro GPUs, concluded that AMD has the “most stable graphics driver in the industry”, passing 93% of its tests compared to Nvidia’s 82%.
“There has been perceptions in the market before of our driver quality,” said Nick Pandher, director, workstation graphics, AMD. “This resets that expectation that we are delivering something that is providing a really stable environment for workstation users.”
AMD has also enhanced its Radeon Pro Software for Enterprise driver. A new remote workstation feature in the 18.Q3 release lets users work from virtually anywhere. The remote workstation capability requires a license of Citrix XenDesktop 7.15+ 1. The XenDesktop Virtual Delivery Agent (VDA) is installed on the workstation and broadcasts the Windows desktop to a Citrix Receiver, which is installed on a client machine. This could be a low-powered desktop or laptop.
The 18.Q3 driver also features a new fan control feature that AMD says can enable a 2x performance uplift over the default fan speed in very demanding workloads.
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