NVIDIA QUADRO P-SERIES VS AMD RADEON PRO WX
Both Nvidia and AMD have recently released new professional graphics cards. We pitted them against each other to find out which is best
We pit the new professional graphic cards against each other to find out which is best
for the last year or so, virtually every professional graphics card we have seen in a workstation has been from Nvidia. One of the main reasons for this is that AMD’S Firepro range hadn’t seen an update since 2014, whereas Nvidia has released a couple of new iterations over the same period. At long last, AMD has updated its professional range, but so has Nvidia. This month, we put the new cards to the test to find out how they compare.
AMD considers its new professional cards a significant enough departure to warrant a change of brand name. The Fire brand, which was formerly Firegl and then became Firepro, dates back to before ATI bought it from Diamond Multimedia in 2001 (and then AMD bought ATI in 2006). Now AMD has doused the Fire and added a Pro to its Radeon brand instead. The Radeon brand still has a reputation for performance, and AMD is also pitching the new range at VR content creation. The Radeon Pro is supposed to be a card that can be used to create and test on the same system.
3D content creation
The Radeon Pro brand arrived in April 2016 with the Duo, and then the SSG in July. But these are specialised cards, and the three new models on test this month are from the mainstream WX range, aimed at more general 3D content creation. The WX 4100 is the entry-level model, with the WX 5100 providing more mainstream performance, and the WX 7100 offering serious 3D power for the money. We have included the latter two in our test. In contrast, Nvidia’s new Quadros are essentially more of the same – but a lot more, particularly as the first two members of the new Quadro P-series are the higher-end ones. The P5000 and P6000 use Nvidia’s latest Pascal core, and take the number of CUDA cores to new heights.
As a result, this group test is not really a head-to-head, as the two new Nvidia Quadro cards are much more expensive than AMD’S new Radeon Pro cards. Since there is no Quadro P4000 as yet, there is no direct competitor. Here, the AMD Radeon Pro WX 7100 competes with the existing Nvidia Quadro M4000 card.
All of this month’s tests were performed on a 3XS Classic 3D workstation from Scan. This system is based around an Intel Core i7-6950x processor permanently clocked to 4GHZ and backed by 64GB of 2,666MHZ DDR4 SDRAM. Since 3D modelling benefits from clock speed rather than cores, this is an ideal test platform. To compare the cards, we ran industry-standard Specviewperf 12.1 and the Opengl test from Maxon Cinebench R15.