AMD's processors have made a big comeback in the professional market, but its most recent workstation graphics haven't met with the same fanfare. The Vega-based Radeon Pro Vega Frontier Edition and WX 9100 are capable 3D accelerators, but the former is a limited edition, and the latter a £1,500 high-end card in the same price range as the NVIDIA Quadro P5000. The Vega range didn't offer anything hugely competitive below £1,000 for professionals. That's all set to change with the AMD Radeon Pro WX 8200.
The WX 8200 isn't just sub-£1,000, it's sub-$1,000, although these days there's not so much difference between the two currencies. Nevertheless, the WX 8200 should undercut the NVIDIA Quadro P4000 in price, perhaps by as much as £100. Yet it's not so far behind the much more expensive WX 9100. Where the latter has 4,096 Stream Processors, the WX 8200 still has a very healthy 3,584. The innovative HBM2 memory is still used, but you only get 8GB instead of the 16GB of the WX 9100.
In other words, you're getting around 88 per cent the GPU power and half the memory for around half the price. Since applications that need more than 8GB frame buffer are still quite specialised, this seems like a great deal.
AMD might not have the grunt in the Vega to compete with the top-end graphics from NVIDIA, but it could well have a very competitive affordable workstation option in the Radeon Pro WX 8200. In this review, we will thoroughly test it against its main current NVIDIA competition – the Quadro P4000, P5000 and P6000.
GPU | AMD Radeon Pro WX 8200 |
AMD Radeon Pro Vega Frontier Edition |
AMD Radeon Pro WX 9100 |
Compute Units |
56 | 64 | 64 |
GPU Cores | 3,584 | 4,096 | 4,096 |
GPU Architecture / Variant | Vega 10 / Vega 10 XT | Vega 10 / Vega 10 XT AIR | Vega 10 / Vega 10 XT |
Base Clock | 1,200 MHz | 1,384 MHz | 1,200 MHz |
GPU Boost Clock | 1,530 MHz | 1,600 MHz | 1,500 MHz |
Total Video memory | 8 GB HBM2 | 16 GB HBM2 | 16 GB HBM2 |
Memory Clock (Effective) |
1,000 (2,000) MHz | 945 (1,890) MHz | 945 (1,890) MHz |
Memory Bandwidth | 512 GB/sec | 484 GB/sec | 484 GB/sec |
Bus Width | 2,048-bit | 2,048-bit | 2,048-bit |
Manufacturing Process | 14nm | 14nm | 14nm |
TDP | 230 W | 300 W | 230 W |
Display Outputs | 4 x Mini-DisplayPort 1.4 | 3 x DisplayPort 1.4, 1 x HDMI 2.0 | 6 x Mini-DisplayPort 1.4 |
Display Resolution |
4 @ 1920×1080
4 @ 3840×2160
3 @ 5120×2880
1 @ 7680×4320
(all at 60Hz)
|
4 @ 1920×1080
4 @ 3840×2160
3 @ 5120×2880
1 @ 7680×4320
(all at 60Hz)
|
6 @ 1920×1080
6 @ 3840×2160
3 @ 5120×2880
1 @ 7680×4320
(all at 60Hz)
|
Software API Support | DirectX 12, OpenGL 4.6, OpenCL 2.0, Vulkan 1.1 | DirectX 12, OpenGL 4.6, OpenCL 2.0, Vulkan 1.1 | DirectX 12, OpenGL 4.6, OpenCL 2.0, Vulkan 1.1 |
AMD Radeon Pro WX 8200 Estimated Retail Price: £762.93 (inc. VAT)
The Radeon Pro WX 8200 looks quite similar to the other members of the Radeon Pro range, with the same vibrant blue casing and decently sized fan with a big R at its centre. This a lengthy 267mm card, so will require a full tower chassis, and two slots.
The major surprise with the WX 8200 is just how little its specification has been reduced compared to the much more expensive WX 9100. It still boasts 3,584 Graphics Core Next Stream Processors, compared to the WX 9100's 4,096, and they run at the same speed of 1,200MHz base clock and 1,500MHz boost. The Frontier Edition ran its core a little faster, however. Although the Quadro P4000 and P5000 have far fewer CUDA cores, and the P6000 a few more, we can't really compare directly as the architecture is different.
The memory allocation is a “swings and roundabouts” situation. This is the main area where the WX 8200 is cut down from the WX 9100, as it only has half the allocation at 8GB. However, this is still HBM2 with a 2,048-bit bus, and the memory clock is slightly higher too at 1,000MHz (2,000MHz effective). This provides a whopping 512GB/sec of bandwidth, up from 484GB/sec for the WX 9100 and Vega Frontier Edition.
This is also twice the frame buffer bandwidth of the Quadro P4000, and 33 per cent faster than the P5000, although the P6000 is only 16 per cent behind thanks to its 384-bit memory interface. The P-series Quadros still use more conventional GDDR5 and GDDR5X memory.
AMD has been putting only Mini-DisplayPort connections on its professional cards for a while (although the Frontier Edition had full-sized ports). In the case of the WX 9100, this allowed for six connections, but the WX 8200 has just four. They are all DisplayPort 1.4-capable, however, so they can support up to four 4K monitors, three 5K, and a single screen at an incredible 7,680 x 4,320.
All of these resolutions can be driven at 60Hz. The Quadros have similar capabilities, although they offer full-sized ports. The P5000 and P6000 even have a Dual-Link DVI connection as well.
A key difference between AMD and NVIDIA comes with GPGPU API support. There's not much to separate the DirectX 12 and OpenGL 4.6 support for real-time 3D acceleration, but when it comes to GPU-powered compute tasks, AMD has put all its weight behind OpenCL whilst NVIDIA has focused on its proprietary CUDA, although there is still support for OpenCL.
Nevertheless, AMD's cards are compatible with OpenCL 2.0, whilst the Quadro P4000, P5000 and P6000 max out at OpenCL 1.2.
Another important difference is in power consumption, or at least the TDP ratings. NVIDIA's cards are quite miserly in comparison to AMD's Vega-based units. Even the P5000 only requires 180W, and the P4000 a mere 105W, whereas the AMD Radeon Pro WX 8200 is rated at 230W. The P6000 is the most power hungry at 250W.
Obviously, these are just ratings and real-world usage could be a completely different story, but the WX 8200, like other Radeon Pros, requires both 8-pin and 6-pin power connections. The P4000 only needs a single six-pin connector, and the P5000 and P6000 a single eight-pin connector.
We have managed to get our hands on all three of NVIDIA's top Quadro P-series cards. The RTX range is imminent, but this will initially only include replacements for the P5000 and P6000, so the P4000 will still remain the main price-for-price competitor to the WX 8200.
The P4000 is a single-width card, whilst the P5000 and P6000 take up two expansion slots like the WX 8200.
There is quite a variation between the specifications of the three Quadros, which we have detailed on the first page of this review. The Quadro P4000 has fewer than half the CUDA cores of the P6000, with the P5000 somewhere in between.
The P4000 also has significantly lower base and boost clocks. So it won't have anywhere near the grunt of its higher-end siblings. But on the plus side it only consumes 105W, which makes it more viable for workstations with limited chassis airflow and cooling.
So the Quadros have quite a bit going for them, but where they lose out to the AMD competition is in price. We didn't have retail pricing for the WX 8200 at the time of writing, but estimates place it £50 cheaper than the P4000, which was £809.99 inc VAT at the time of writing.
The WX 9100 was about twice as much as the WX 8200 at £1,583.99 inc VAT, and the P5000 similarly priced at £1,549.99 inc VAT. The P6000, however, is in a different league. It costs a phenomenal £5,198.99 inc VAT, which places it in a very specialist market where its performance and frame buffer size are mission-critical necessities.
GPU | NVIDIA Quadro P4000 | NVIDIA Quadro P5000 |
NVIDIA Quadro P6000 |
Compute Units |
14 | 20 | 30 |
GPU Cores | 1,792 | 2,560 | 3,840 |
GPU Architecture / Variant | Pascal / GP104 | Pascal / GP104 | Pascal / GP102 |
Base Clock | 1,202 MHz | 1,607MHz | 1,506MHz |
GPU Boost Clock | 1,480MHz | 1,733MHz | 1,645MHz |
Total Video memory | 8GB GDDR5 | 16GB GDDR5X | 24GB GDDR5X |
Memory Clock (Effective) |
1,901 (7,604) MHz | 1,127 (9,016) MHz | 1,127 (9,016) MHz |
Memory Bandwidth | 243 GB/sec | 288.5 GB/sec | 432.8 GB/sec |
Bus Width | 256-bit | 256-bit | 384-bit |
Manufacturing Process | 16nm | 16nm | 16nm |
TDP | 105 W | 180 W | 250 W |
Display Outputs | 4 x DisplayPort 1.4 | 4 x DisplayPort 1.4, 1 x Dual-Link DVI-D | 4 x DisplayPort 1.4, 1 x Dual-Link DVI-D |
Display Resolution |
4 @ 4096×2160 @ 120Hz
4 @ 5120×2880 @ 60Hz
|
4 @ 4096×2160 @ 120Hz
4 @ 5120×2880 @ 60Hz 1 @ 7680×4320 @ 30Hz
|
4 @ 4096×2160 @ 120Hz
4 @ 5120×2880 @ 60Hz 1 @ 7680×4320 @ 30Hz
|
Software API Support | DirectX 12, OpeGL 4.6, OpenCL 1.2, Vulkan 1.0, CUDA 6.1 | DirectX 12, OpeGL 4.6, OpenCL 1.2, Vulkan 1.0, CUDA 6.1 | DirectX 12, OpeGL 4.6, OpenCL 1.2, Vulkan 1.0, CUDA 6.1 |
We tested the AMD Radeon Pro WX 8200 in an Armari Magnetar S16T-RD1000G2 workstation. This is a hugely powerful workstation based around AMD's phenomenal new Ryzen Threadripper 2950X processor, backed with 32GB of 3,000MHz DDR4 SDRAM.
For comparison, we pitted the WX 8200 against NVIDIA's Quadro P4000 and P5000. For reference, for some tests we also included results from the Armari Magnetar S32T-RD1000G2, as this came with AMD Radeon Pro WX 9100 graphics. However, as the CPU and RAM setup were different for this machine, these results can't be directly compared, although most of the GPU-focused software used for testing would have derived virtually identical results using the primary hardware platform in this test.
Where the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2950X is essentially two Ryzen 7 2700X CPUs packaged together, the Threadripper 2990WX is essentially four of them. The main difference other than core count is therefore how high the single cores can go with less multi-threaded software.
Software:
Maxon Cinebench R15
SPECviewperf 13
VRMark Advanced Edition
Blender 2.79b
Blender Benchmark 1.0b2
Adobe Media Encoder CC 2018
Black Magic Design Resolve 15
LuxMark 3.1
Armari Magnetar S16T-RD1000G2 Specifications:
- AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2950X @4GHz
- Enermax Liqtech TR4 Water Cooling
- 64GB Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4-3600 SDRAM @ 3,000MHz
- Asrock X399 Taichi Motherboard
- 16GB HBM AMD Radeon Pro WX 9100 Graphics
- 1TB Samsung PM981 M.2 NVMe PCI Express SSD
- LiteOn Slimline SATA DVD-RW
- 1000W EVGA SuperNOVA Gold Efficiency PSU
- Armari Magnetar S-Series Chassis
- Windows 10 Professional 64-bit
- 3 Years Warranty (1st Year On-Site, 2nd and 3rd Years RTB Parts and Labour)
CINEBENCH 15 is a cross-platform testing suite that measures hardware performance and is the de facto standard benchmarking tool for leading companies and trade journals for conducting real-world hardware performance tests. With the new Release 15, systems with up to 256 threads can be tested.
CINEBENCH is available for both Windows and OS X and is used by almost all hardware manufacturers and trade journals for comparing CPUs and graphics cards. We only ran the Open GL portion of the test, as graphics power has no effect on rendering performance.
The WX 8200 is only slightly behind the WX 9100 in the Cinebench OpenGL viewport test. However, the Quadro P4000 is 12 per cent faster, and the more expensive Quadros go upwards from here.
So if you're running Maxon Cinebench for modelling, the Quadro P4000 just shades it despite the higher price. Note that in these tests the AMD Radeon Pro WX 9100 was tested on a slightly different platform, which may have given it a slightly lower score than it would have on the main test platform.
SPECviewperf 13
The SPECviewperf 13 benchmark is the worldwide standard for measuring graphics performance based on professional applications. The benchmark measures the 3D graphics performance of systems running under the OpenGL and Direct X application programming interfaces. The benchmark’s workloads, called viewsets, represent graphics content and behavior from actual applications.
The latest version is SPECviewperf 13, released on May 23, 2018. SPECgpc members at the time of V13 release include AMD, Dell, Fujitsu, HP, Intel, Lenovo, and NVIDIA.
SPECviewperf 13 is a comprehensive upgrade of previous versions of the benchmark. Medical and energy viewsets incorporate new models and raycasting for volume visualization; the Maya viewset features new models based on the SPECapc for Maya 2017 benchmark; and the Creo viewset has been updated with fresh application traces. All other viewsets have been recompiled with minor changes. Results from SPECviewperf 13 are not comparable to those from earlier versions.
Other major updates in SPECviewperf 13 include:
- Support for 4K resolution displays.
- New reporting methods, including JSON output that enables more robust and flexible result parsing.
- A new user interface that will be standardized across all SPEC/GWPG benchmarks.
- New workloads and scoring that reflect the range of activities found in real-world applications.
- Various bug fixes and performance improvements.
The results with SPECviewperf 13 are much more varied, showing how much professional graphics choice is considerably affected by precisely what software you intend to run. Note that in these tests the AMD Radeon Pro WX 9100 was tested on a slightly different platform, which may have affected the results in some viewsets, so these scores are included merely for comparison.
The WX 8200 performs very respectably with the 3dsmax-06 viewset, beating the WX 9100 and NVIDIA Quadros up to and including the P5000, although the mega-expensive P6000 is way ahead of the pack. This will be a great graphics card for modelling with Autodesk 3ds Max.
The story is similar with the catia-05 viewset. The WX 8200 just squeezes past the P4000, although the P5000 is significantly in front, and the P6000 is again way ahead. If your main work is with Dassault Systèmes CATIA, the WX 8200 will be a cost-effective option.
The WX 8200 is not so impressive with the creo-02 viewset, coming in last amongst the other cards. The Quadro P4000 is 21 per cent faster, making it the better option if you run the PTC Creo CAD software mainly.
The story is similar with the energy-02 and medical-02 viewsets. However, these tests don't correspond directly to specific branded software applications. The energy-02 viewset is based OpendTect seismic visualisation.
With the maya-05 viewset, the WX 8200 can't beat its premium WX 9100 sibling, but it cruises past the P4000 and P5000. The P6000 is (as usual) noticeably out in front. If you do 3D animation with Autodesk Maya, as with 3ds Max, the WX 8200 will provide very smooth modelling for the money.
The showcase-02 viewset is another one based on Autodesk software, in this case Showcase. AMD Radeon Pros are clearly well optimised for this. The WX 9100 is only 11 per cent slower than the Quadro P6000, and the WX 8200 only 9 per cent slower than the WX 9100. The P4000 and P5000 are left in the dust.
The final two viewsets – snx-03 and sw-04 – are focused on CAD software used frequently for product design – Siemens NX and Solidworks respectively. The WX 8200 is respectable in both tests, but behind the other cards. If you use either of these applications, NVIDIA's Quadro P4000 is a slightly better sub-£1,000 graphics card choice.
Overall, though, the AMD Radeon Pro WX 8200 acquits itself very well with SPECviewperf 13, considering that it is the cheapest card on test. Its forte appears to be 3D animation with Autodesk applications rather than engineering or product design CAD, but even with these types of software it does respectably, if slightly behind the NVIDIA competition.
VRMark Advanced Edition
The performance requirements for VR games are much higher than for typical PC games. So if you're developing content for the HTC Vive or an Oculus Rift, you will need to do son a PC that can cope with the added load.
VRMark includes three VR benchmark tests. You can run the tests on your monitor, no headset required, or on a connected HMD. At the end of each test, you'll see whether your PC is VR ready, and if not, how far it falls short.
We performed our tests with the middle Cyan Room run. This is a DirectX 12 benchmark. It features a large, complex scene and many eye-catching effects. Cyan Room shows how using an API with less overhead can help developers deliver impressive VR experiences even on modest PC systems.
The WX 8200 is clearly very good with VR, beating both the P4000 and P5000 hands down. Only the P6000 shows it a clean set of heels.
LuxMark 3.1
OpenCL is a platform for harnessing GPU power for activities other than real-time 3D rendering to screen, also known as GPGPU. Unlike NVIDIA’s CUDA platform, OpenCL is open source and can be ported to anything with processing power. So drivers are available for CPUs as well, both from Intel and AMD. NVIDIA's graphics cards also support OpenCL, albeit an earlier version (1.2) than the AMD cards, which support version 2.0.
A popular tool for testing OpenCL performance is LuxMark. We rendered the most gruelling Hotel Lobby scene.
The WX 8200 clearly has a huge amount of raw OpenCL power available. In fact, it beat the WX 9100 in this test by four per cent. It's 47 per cent ahead of the P4000, and the P5000 is strangely even further behind. Only the P6000 steams ahead, but only by 9 per cent.
Blender 2.79b: Gooseberry Production Benchmark
Blender is a free and open source 3D creation suite. It supports the entirety of the 3D pipeline—modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, even video editing and game creation. The latest version at the time of writing, 2.79b, supports rendering on the GPU as well as the CPU. In GPU mode, it will render using OpenCL with AMD graphics cards, and CUDA with NVIDIA graphics cards.
For this test, we used the Gooseberry Production Benchmark. Project Gooseberry is the code name for the Blender Institute’s 6th open movie, Cosmos Laundromat — a 10-minute short, the pilot for the planned first-ever free/open source animated feature film. The benchmark renders a single frame from this film in intermediate quality.
Unfortunately, this render is so intensive that it doesn't run on cards with only 8GB frame buffers – including the AMD Radeon Pro WX 8200 and NVIDIA Quadro P4000. It should also be noted that whilst AMD cards are fine with 32 x 32 tile sizes, NVIDIA cards prefer 256 x 256. So we have included these partial results to show how the synthetic OpenCL performance shown with LuxMark 3.1 pans out in a real GP Compute render on the AMD and NVIDIA architectures
As already noted, the WX 8200 and P4000 run out of memory with this render and can't complete, but it's clear that the AMD Radeon Pro WX 9100 has a lot of GPU Compute power compared even to the Quadro P6000.
Blender Benchmark 1.0b2
The Blender Benchmark is a platform to collect and display the results of hardware and software performance tests with the open source Blender 3D content creation application. The benchmark aims to provide an optimal comparison between system hardware and installations, and to assist developers to track performance during Blender development.
The benchmark consists of two parts: a downloadable package which runs Blender and renders on several production files, and the Open Data portal on blender.org, where the results will be (optionally) uploaded. The full benchmark renders six different scenes of varying complexity, and can be run on both CPU and GPU. We ran them on the four main test GPUs.
For some reason, the barbershop_interior scene would not render on any of the NVIDIA graphics cards. All of them crashed with this test. But the other five scenes rendered as normal.
The results echo our synthetic OpenCL test. The WX 8200's OpenCL power is clearly immense, because it trounces the P4000 and P5000 in every test, and runs the P6000 closely too. In fact, it's slighlty faster at rendering the classroom scene, and a lot faster with the koro scene. If you are planning to render 3D via GPU compute, the WX 8200 has a lot of OpenCL grunt on offer, despite its sub-£1,000 price. However, it can't cope with scenes that require more memory than its 8GB frame buffer.
NVIDIA-P4000-benchmark-result NVIDIA-P5000-benchmark-result NVIDIA-P6000-benchmark-result AMD_Radeon_Pro_WX8200-BlenderBenchmarkFull
Video Encoding – Adobe Media Encoder CC 2018
Like 3D rendering, video encoding is a task that can now take advantage of multi-core processors. Although a lot of reviews focus on Open Source encoders such as Handbrake, this is a review of professional applications, so we have two tests, starting with Adobe Media Encoder CC 2018 (AME). You can download a trial of the latest version of this software from Adobe. For an encoding source, we used the 4K UHD (3,840 x 2,160) version of the Blender Mango Project Tears of Steel movie.
We encoded with the Vimeo 1080p HD preset in AME. This is a MP4 H.264 preset, using High Profile and Level 4.2. There are two modes available for the AME rendering engine (called the Mercury Playback Engine, presumably because it’s smooth and, erm, shiny). One uses software only, so will just employ the CPU. But you can also call in CUDA on NVIDIA graphics and OpenCL on AMD graphics.
We ran the software-only encode with all the graphics cards as well as with GPU acceleration, to show that the graphics were being used in every case.
This test doesn't tell us very much about the relative performance of the graphics cards, since they all get around the same result, although the WX 8200 is about 3 per cent quicker.
What it does tell you is that AME is not making good use of the full underlying power of the GPUs. Spending more money on a faster GPU won't help with AME encoding, but it's worth having some GPU support because it can cut around a third off of an ecode.
Video Encoding – Black Magic Design DaVinci Resolve 15
We wanted to see if other professional video software could make better use of the GPUs, so we turned to Black Magic Design's DaVinci Resolve 15. This is becoming increasingly popular with professionals, particularly after the company added serious editing facilities to the already well-respected grading capabilities.
The software takes particularly significant advantage of your graphics card when grading and encoding. Just to add icing on the cake, you can get the basic version for free, although if you want to speed up your system with multiple graphics cards you need to pay for the Studio option. But the free version enables acceleration from a single graphics card, making it a perfect option for our second video encoding test.
Again, we used the 4K UHD (3,840 x 2,160) version of the Blender Mango Project Tears of Steel movie, and again we encoded with the Vimeo 1080p HD preset provided. This is a MP4 H.264 preset, using High Profile and Level 4.2. Resolve 15 supports acceleration via CUDA on NVIDIA graphics and OpenCL on AMD graphics. You can't turn off graphics acceleration, however, so all the following results are with the GPU enabled.
There is a fair bit of debate online about what graphics are best for running Resolve, and the consensus is that professional graphics aren't worth the extra money. Our test shows that, at least when encoding from 4K to HD, it doesn't matter which professional graphics card you have – it doesn't make any noticeable difference.
Multi-tasking
For our final test, we put one of AMD's most unusual claims to the test. AMD reckons that its WX 8200 is much more capable of doing multiple tasks at once than its NVIDIA competition – in particular, real-time modelling and another task that includes GPU Compute such as rendering or video encoding. So we ran a subset of SPECviewperf 13 at the same time as ten simultaneous encodes of the 4K Tears of Steel movie to the Vimeo HD preset, using Adobe Media Encoder CC 2018. This runs all the encodes at the same time, which means there is no break between files where the GPU is not under load.
However, the graphics cards varied as to how many of the SPECviewper 13 viewsets they could get through during the encoding time. The grapsh below only include the viewsets that were completed whilst the encode was still running. For all viewsets completed after the encode was over, we have entered a score of zero, although in the raw results at the bottom of this page you can see that performance (as expected) went back up to the levels when no other tasks were being performed at the same time.
The first thing to note is that the AMD Radeon Pro WX 8200 managed to complete six viewsets during the encode time, whereas the NVIDIA Quadro P4000 only completed two in a similar timeframe. The drop in 3D modelling performance for the WX 8200 was also far less than for the P4000. Whilst the WX 8200 was still providing usable frame rates in all the viewsets it completed, the P4000 had dropped to a completely unusable level where the jerky response would make any designer give up.
The P5000 and P6000 didn't fare much better. The P6000 managed to hit 30.65 in catia-05, but that's scarcely ten per cent of what it can achieve doing 3D modelling on its own. It only complete two viewsets within its encoding time, but as you will see from the next graph, the P6000 is much quicker when encoding to multiple targets simultaneously than the other graphics cards.
The WX 8200 does take a bit more of a hit in its encoding time (14 per cent longer to complete) than the NVIDIA cards (9 per cent or lower). But in the balance, you can encode with the WX 8200 using GPU Compute acceleration whilst doing useful 3D modelling at the same time, whereas you can't with any of the NVIDIA Quadros, even the P6000.
The AMD Radeon Pro WX 8200 isn't quite a performance revelation, but then we weren't expecting it to be one. Nevertheless, there a few small performance surprises, where it manages to get past its WX 9100 sibling. However, the real excitement comes from the fact that the WX 8200 is around half the price of the WX 9100, yet offers very similar abilities apart from having half the frame buffer.
It's not quite a complete NVIDIA Quadro P4000 killer, because there are still some professional content creation and CAD applications where the latter has the upper hand. But in most cases the WX 8200 provides similar or better performance for less, where the WX 9100 was a direct P5000 competitor and didn't quite have the grunt to be the obvious alternative.
Where AMD cards have been strong for a while is GPU Compute, and the WX 8200 is not just a much better option for this than the P4000, but also shows the Quadro P5000 a thing or two. If you plan to continue modelling whilst encoding using GPU Compute acceleration, NVIDIA cards clearly aren't capable. But apart from this, the P6000 is still in a class of its own. It's exorbitantly expensive, but AMD has nothing to compete with it on raw performance at present, so if that's what you need then it may be worth the massive outlay.
Overall, though, the AMD Radeon Pro WX 8200 is a real professional 3D graphics contender. It's a very valid alternative to the NVIDIA Quadro P4000, particularly if you use Autodesk 3ds Max or Maya, and even more if you plan to use the GPU for encoding at the same time as modelling. With no Quadro RTX 4000 likely to appear this year, the AMD Radeon Pro WX 8200 takes the crown as the sub-£1,000 professional 3D graphics champion.
Pros:
- Almost as fast as AMD Radeon WX 9100 in most tests, and faster in some.
- Cheaper than NVIDIA Quadro P4000.
- Faster than NVIDIA Quadro P4000 in many 3D content creation applications.
- Faster than NVIDIA Quadro P5000 with some software.
- Excellent GPU Compute abilities.
- Much better for running GPU Compute and modelling simultaneously.
Cons:
- NVIDIA Quadro P4000 faster with some CAD and product design applications.
- Relatively power hungry.
Kitguru says: AMD has a real sub-£1,000 professional graphics acceleration contender with the Radeon Pro WX 8200. It's the optimum choice for many applications, particularly 3D animation and GPU Compute rendering.
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