AMD launches Radeon Pro WX workstation graphics cards

[HEXUS]

Professional Polaris-based cards said to be the among best in their class.

Read more.

[scaryjim]

Based on compute performance, all those cards are clocked well over 1GHz. Guess we now know where the top bin Polaris dies are going, and why the consumer cards are making do with higher voltage or harvested dies.

Wonder if future respins will see consumer cards with 1792 shaders running at 1088MHz in a 75W TDP envelope...? Well, I can dream, can't I?

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Based on compute performance, all those cards are clocked well over 1GHz. Guess we now know where the top bin Polaris dies are going, and why the consumer cards are making do with higher voltage or harvested dies.

Wonder if future respins will see consumer cards with 1792 shaders running at 1088MHz in a 75W TDP envelope...? Well, I can dream, can't I?

The Polaris 11 based WX4100 is a low profile and single slot card. It makes me wonder if GF has had more issues than Samsung with its implementation of the same process,or whether there is some design issue on the AMD side here. The GP107 is similarly sized and Nvidia is selling full chips with no issue!

Edit!!

Having said that AMD Radeon ProRender has been picked by Maxon for Cinema4D too(basis of Cinebench):

http://forums.hexus.net/pc-hardware-...ml#post3727318

[LSG501]

The thing that gets me here is that AMD haven't even attempted to target above 'mid range' professional cards.... 8GB is not what I'd class as a sufficient amount of memory for a card being used for gpu rendering.

While imo the top tier quadros are a waste of money in most cases, due to a majority of 3D apps now going direct x over opengl (iirc maya and solidworks are the only two that come to mind) meaning unless you specifically need ram or support you might as well buy a geforce instead, you can at least get a high end quadro with more than enough vram to support larger scene gpu rendering.

As to AMD ProRender (really should just be called corona's opencl gpu renderer as thats basically what it is)... it's not exactly very good based on the imagery I've seen, unlike the normal corona which is pretty good but uses the cpu. IMO they'd have been better off investing in getting better support in vrayrt etc as the relative performance when using opencl seems to be lower than using cuda.

And to be honest unless something drastically happens to chaos group, most people in the design visualisation field will stick with what they know and continue to use vray/vray rt. 3DS Max for example doesn't even auto install iray anymore and have instead made their own cross program renderer the default program for 'casual' users, this is partly due to pros usually just installing vray or in some cases octane (cuda), arion (cuda) or keyshot (cpu) instead.

[kalniel]

The thing that gets me here is that AMD haven't even attempted to target above 'mid range' professional cards.... 8GB is not what I'd class as a sufficient amount of memory for a card being used for gpu rendering.

I think that's because Polaris isn't really above mid-range. Vega is the biggy and I expect we'll see some targeting of render farms with those products.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

They finally have been reviewed:

http://hothardware.com/reviews/amd-r...on-gpu-reviews

Its a shame AMD don't make a normal Radeon card based on the WX4100 - it would be awesome for low power and HTPC systems.