It’s Vega, baby!

AMD isn’t just hitting Intel where it hurts; it’s also causing Nvidia sleepless nights. The Radeon Pro WX 7100 on show here had a brief period – before Nvidia launched the Quadro P4000 – where it was the sub-£1,000 professional graphics adapter of choice. The P4000, despite being a little more expensive, has switched things back in Nvidia’s favour. But only for the time being.

The WX 7100 is just one member of AMD’s renamed Radeon Pro range, which takes over from the former FirePro and FireGL before that. There are lesser WX 5100 and WX 4100 models beneath it, and the intriguing Radeon Pro Duo above, which is essentially two WX 7100 cards with 16GB of GDDR5 memory each stuck together. The Radeon Pro Duo requires software support for dual GPUs to see benefits when modelling, but that’s not where this graphics card is aimed.

AMD’s GPUs are particularly strong in OpenCLbased GPGPU activities. The WX 7100 is capable of OpenCL performance only 20% slower than the Quadro P5000, which is around three times the price, so the Radeon Pro Duo (which is still about half the price of a P5000) is an OpenCL monster. To capitalise on this, AMD has released a set of ProRender plugins for various 3D content creation applications, which harness the GPU for rendering. Blender, 3ds Max and Maya have plugins already, with Maxon’s Cinema 4D including support in its next iteration. The situation will get even more interesting when AMD releases its next GPU generation, codenamed Vega. This will reportedly increase the number of instructions per clock, add support for HBM2 memory, and enable tile-based rasterization, which Nvidia has had since 2014. Early leaks indicate that the Radeon Pro spin on Vega will have at least twice the processing power of the WX 7100. So, as with its processors, AMD has reasons to be optimistic about the future of its workstation graphics cards.