Workstation Graphics: 19 Cards Tested In SPECviewperf 12

[FormatC]

SPECviewperf 12 sets out to be the standard for evaluating workstation graphics cards by including the latest professional applications, more complex models, and synthetic workloads pulled from important market segments. We test 19 cards in the new suite.

Workstation Graphics: 19 Cards Tested In SPECviewperf 12 : Read more

 

[spp85]

AMD FirePro now a days performs very good at a cheaper price. Good job AMD. Keep on improving that.
When AMD releases the mighty 16GB FirePro 9100 based on Radeon R9-290X core will be competitive to the Quadro K6000 in performance.

 

[ykki]

Waiting for the W9100 benchmarks and oh lord (AMD) let it be good!

 

[FormatC]

I've also reviewed the FirePro W9100 in a large article with a lot of real-world benchmarks (the review was published last week in German). But AMD is really funny: the W9100 launch was at 7th, the R9 295X2 at 8th... So we got not time enough to translate it faster or merge the results. It's a shame

 

[Shankovich]

Can't wait for the W9100 benchmarks! Getting one sent to me but oh man I still want to see some results

 

[PepitoTV]

I would've loved to see Titan benchmarks included as that card is often named as a 'poor man' workstation card...

 

[bobcramblitt]

Thanks for this. Would love to see some future benchmarking of workstation-level systems using the new SPEC workstation benchmark (SPECwpc V1.0 -- http://www.spec.org/gwpg/wpc.static/wpcv1info.html). But, then again, I'm a SPEC guy...

 

[edhap]

Hey SPEC guy, when can we do away with synthetic benchmarks for the workstation market? Hopefully VP12 is the last of these and you can focus on real applications. The last thing I need is another benchmark that does not match real world use cases

I find that internal benchmarking the only way to really understand the value of workstation cards. W7000 for example - it was awesome in our internal testing. While good, the cards is much better than these benchmark results suggest. Not sure why I would look at another SPEC benchmark when I will still need to test the cards in-house to really know how good they are for our applications and models.

 

[adamglick]

Fortunately, VP12 is MUCH MUCH closer to an actual (non-biased) representation of real-world application performance than was VP11. Yes, it's still "synthetic" but it uses actual code traces from updated versions of real applications -and its results are typically in-line with actual application testing results.

Unfortunately, testing in the real applications (using something like APCapc) requires actual licenses of the software apps. Many of these vendors (CATIA, NX, etc) simply don't make temp licenses available for reviewers/journalists or other non-users.

VP12 should be quite good enough to help make informed evaluations of GPU hardware. If you are concerned about seeing in-application performance measurements for particular apps, you can ususually find the data with a bit of googling, although take results you find posted on the internet by "regular Joe's" with a grain of salt.

Adam Glick
Sapphire Technologies

 

[adamglick]

*It is a shame Tom's did not include the results of the latest AMD FirePro 9100 card. They do actually have this card for eval and testing in house and It's a mystery to me why they chose not to include the results here.

tsk tsk tsk

 

[filippi]

It was a great review. thanks a lot!

About CPU Scaling: "In the second set of our scaling results, only SolidWorks responds to CPU frequency. Core and thread count don't make a difference.¨

This is not entirely true. It goes as far as 10% at 4.5 GHz.

 

[bobcramblitt]

Hey SPEC guy, when can we do away with synthetic benchmarks for the workstation market? Hopefully VP12 is the last of these and you can focus on real applications. The last thing I need is another benchmark that does not match real world use cases

I find that internal benchmarking the only way to really understand the value of workstation cards. W7000 for example - it was awesome in our internal testing. While good, the cards is much better than these benchmark results suggest. Not sure why I would look at another SPEC benchmark when I will still need to test the cards in-house to really know how good they are for our applications and models.

 

[bobcramblitt]

SPEC does offer application benchmarks (SPECapc) that run with the installed apps. But, there are many people who do not want to have to benchmark on a licensed app. For those, SPEC offers Viewperf. Or you might want to try SPECwpc for full workstation performance -- this includes some viewsets, but also open-source apps. Sure the SPECviewperf viewsets are synthetic, but they represent actual traces of how the application is engaging with graphics subsystems. No one at SPEC would argue that its benchmarks substitute for your real-world testing based on how you use apps every day.

 

[FormatC]

*It is a shame Tom's did not include the results of the latest AMD FirePro 9100 card. They do actually have this card for eval and testing in house and It's a mystery to me why they chose not to include the results here.
tsk tsk tsk

It is so problematic to read the posts above too? I wrote:

I've also reviewed the FirePro W9100 in a large article with a lot of real-world benchmarks (the review was published last week in German). But AMD is really funny: the W9100 launch was at 7th, the R9 295X2 at 8th... So we got not time enough to translate it faster or merge the results. It's a shame

And for your information: AMD (Sapphire included) was not able to send me a R9 295X2 to my lab here in Germany! So I had to wait for Chris' card (yes, we've paid 550 bucks only for FedEx Priority from U.S. to Germany) and I was so lucky to handle two launch articles at the same time. The day has 24 hrs only, sorry for my laziness.

You get the complete W9100 story (the updated SPECviewperf12 is only a part of this) on 17 pages, don't worry, but it must be translated first.

 

[urtrapt]

Please add the Titan and Titan Black to this benchmark.

 

[FormatC]

Useless. Both are slower than 780 Ti OC

Titan is good for compute, the SPECviewperf12 is more graphics related. No chance for consumer cards.

 

[urtrapt]

With that attitude you should just sum the entire review of graphics card with
"Don't bother with anything else because Nvidia K6000 is the fastest."

 

[FormatC]

Totally wrong.

You see the results of the consumer cards inside? The Titan is a little bit slower than the tested GTX 780 Ti, the Titan Black is in such cases 2-3% faster. But both are slower than a 780 Ti OC and the results of this card are in the most cases absolutelly worthles. I've tested the consumer cards belong the workstion graphics only for demonstration purposes.

But it really makes no sense to run pro-apps with non-certified hardware and drivers!

 

[wiyosaya]

In my opinion, people who would run a gaming card in these apps would not be using models as complicated as those in the test.

 

[hologram]

So let me get this straight. As A Maya user the 780 Ti or even a titan Black would be a better choice than a Quadro???

 

[hologram]

sorry there were some posts between the time I read the article and the time I posted.
A better question is this. The 780 TI OC is faster than a titan black? And are these tests with the normal 780 TI driver? If so for working not he road a 780 ti rig will do the job.

 

[dragonsqrrl]

So let me get this straight. As A Maya user the 780 Ti or even a titan Black would be a better choice than a Quadro???

Not necessarily. First you have to remember there's a lot more to viewport performance in Maya and other pro content creation apps than just raw fps. Geforce drivers are not optimized or validated for Maya, and it's not unheard of for rendering errors to occur in certain situations, and these can be frustrating and time consuming if you're not immediately aware of the problem. Then there's the higher color depth support, but I'm not sure how important that is for Maya's viewport.

Second, this benchmark seems fairly limited in scope. It tests a single static scene under just one of Maya's viewport renderers. Viewport 2.0 will be the new default renderer in Maya 2015, so I feel it would've been relevant to include in the benchmark results, perhaps even more so than HQ or DQ. SPECapc runs a much wider range of test scenes and scenarios that I think gives the user a better overall picture of viewport performance in Maya. There are a few problems though. Like viewperf SPEC hasn't updated apc in a while, but it can still be run in Maya 2014. There's also the fact that apc performance results seem to make absolutely no sense sometimes, and unlike viewperf you need an actual Maya license to run the benchmarks.

 

[FormatC]

100% ackn. This fps are only the half of the truth.

 

[Rob Burns]

Why?? Why no 3DS Max? Such a popular program! Such a large community of users! Tom's you've been my go to PC tech site for years, but I feel my reasons for checking in here are dwindling as my main software by trade is included less and less in your hardware reviews. Max was always in your charts and reviews up until the last year or 2, why the exclusion?? Please bring it back to your standard suite of benchmarks and charts.

 

[FormatC]

Why?? Why no 3DS Max? Such a popular program! Such a large community of users! Tom's you've been my go to PC tech site for years, but I feel my reasons for checking in here are dwindling as my main software by trade is included less and less in your hardware reviews. Max was always in your charts and reviews up until the last year or 2, why the exclusion?? Please bring it back to your standard suite of benchmarks and charts.

The title is: Workstation Graphics: 19 Cards Tested In SPECviewperf 12

Max is not a part of SPECvieperf12. Why the hell we have to merge two absolutely different things?