AMD FirePro W8000 And W9000 Review: GCN Goes Pro

[FormatC]

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.

AMD FirePro W8000 And W9000 Review: GCN Goes Pro : Read more

 

[mayankleoboy1]

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.

 

[mayankleoboy1]

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 ?

 

[rdc85]

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..

 

[Guest]

My impression is that on average, Nvidia higher quality. IMHO of course

 

[bystander]

[citation][nom]mayankleoboy1[/nom]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.[/citation]
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.

 

[Guest]

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.

 

[ohim]

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.

 

[rmpumper]

The review needs at least one gaming GPU as comparison.

 

[Guest]

I always wondered how well these cards would do with games, anyone an idea?

 

[mayankleoboy1]

[citation][nom]ohim[/nom]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.[/citation]

AFAIK, its not possible now to BIOS mod a regular 7970 into a W9000. AMD and Nvidia have become smarter.

 

[ohim]

Maybe but it`s quite stupid to have the same engine inside, different body and ask 4- 10 times the price.

 

[fuzznarf]

Seriously Tom's?? No Blender benchmark? Still??

 

[zaxevil]

is this good for playing games ? are we will get better performance ?

 

[zaxevil]

every stuff has his advantages and disadvantages...how poorrrrrr

 

[opmopadop]

I wonder how different the video drivers run under an intel based cpu?

 

[shin0bi272]

Love how you left out the 6 series nvidia cards in your consumer card tests. Very sneaky THG.

 

[sam_m]

Have you considered adding Autodesk Inventor to the test schedule? It's an equivalent 3d cad application to SolidWorks but it's DirectX instead of OpenGL and thus would show the need for these workstation cards to perform in both areas. A lot of Inventor users have found benefit in gaming cards over workstation (especially when it comes to performance/price ratio), so would love to see Inventor included in these reviews (as well as some gaming cards to gauge a workstation v gaming performance/price comparison for both OpenGL and DirectX).

 

[TeraMedia]

I didn't see any indication of CPU load in the article. Based on the game card analyses that THG has done in the past, I think it's fair to say that NV's cards and drivers tend to put less load on the CPU, which means that these FirePro cards might be putting a higher load on those Opterons than the Quadro cards. And if that load is limited to a single core or is bottlenecked by memory bandwidth or latency, then what you've really done with your testing is handicapped those high-end FirePro cards with a cheap CPU.

It is possible that the drivers are the problem. The fact that the rest of the playing field members perform consistently relatively to each other while the W series shows outstanding highs in some tests and unfortunate lows in others indicates to me that the new FirePros could be improved substantially in the tests in which they underperform - whether by using better CPUs or with driver updates, or some combination.

 

[jaquith]

Excellent review, a tad bias here and there, but overall very good.

Some benchmarks especially DirectX Benchmarks made no sense to me, but who knows what folks do. It's been long known each of these cards have both strengths and weakness so like any tool choose the right one for the job. Perhaps the next gen will close those gaps.

 

[FormatC]

The Unigine Heaven comparison between OpenGL and DirectX is similar to Inventor. This was one of the reasons, to check the "gaming" performance in DirectX.

But your idea is registered in my database of wishes

 

[fuzznarf]

[citation][nom]shin0bi272[/nom]Love how you left out the 6 series nvidia cards in your consumer card tests. Very sneaky THG.[/citation]
Are you smoking crack?!?! the 6k quadros are there. Perhaps it would help if you read the whole article.

 

[viridiancrystal]

[citation][nom]shin0bi272[/nom]Love how you left out the 6 series nvidia cards in your consumer card tests. Very sneaky THG.[/citation]
THG did Nvidia a favor by doing that. Nvidia's 6xx series is total crap in GPGPU.

 

[FormatC]

Nope, no chance to play with the BIOS. Extracting an flashing is impossible.

 

[bloodypulp]

Review feels very incomplete. Needs comparisons at higher resolutions, multi-monitor and GTX6x0 series.