AMD Radeon Pro W6800 Professional Graphics Card Review

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, and the latest Ampere cards can handle 3.0, whereas the AMD cards remain on version 2.1.

A popular tool for testing OpenCL performance is LuxMark. We rendered the most gruelling Hotel Lobby scene.

The AMD Radeon PRo W6800 clearly has a LOT more grunt than the AMD Radeon Pro W5500 or W5700. However, this test is very telling as an explanation for earlier results. The W6800 has a marginally more powerful OpenCL ability than the NVIDIA Quadro RTX A4000 (1 per cent), but the A5000 is 51 faster than the W6800, and the A6000 is 75 per cent faster.

In other words, while AMD has clearly moved forward a lot with the Navi 21, NVIDIA's Ampere has taken the goalposts and shifted them to another pitch.

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