Based on AMD’s next-generation “Vega” GPU architecture, the Radeon Pro WX 9100 and Radeon Pro SSG professional graphics cards introduce advanced technology never before seen in the professional space, claims AMD.
Radeon’s new professional graphics are, “designed to dramatically accelerate the pace of professional content creation today” while enabling creators to take bold new steps into the more demanding workflows of tomorrow. The new cards aloow, according to AMD, to reduce or eliminate traditional content creation barriers, empowering artists, designers and engineers to better realize their visions.
The Vega GPU architecture delivers 2.3X the performance to accelerate professional applications, 2.6X geometry throughput for complex models, no local memory limits for mammoth data sets, and breaks the terabyte graphics memory barrier enabling 8K workflows.
“Today we’re seeing the convergence of our professional markets. Real-time visualization, graphics virtualization, and machine intelligence are coming together to enable extraordinary new possibilities for professionals, and no one is better positioned to win than AMD. Radeon Pro was built on the promise of enabling the art of the impossible, giving professional content creators a means to realize even their wildest ambitions. But their visions and the technology needed to achieve them is a moving target, an unending challenge that demands more from creators and the technology they use every year. With the new Radeon Pro WX 9100 and Radeon Pro SSG, we’re breaking new ground and we can’t wait to see how you unleash this power,” said Ogi Brkic, general manager, professional graphics, Radeon Technologies Group, AMD.
Siggraph 2017 is the stage for a battle of giants. NVIDIA introduces its new Quadro external GPU solution and announces new drivers which allow the Titan Xp to run three times faster with some applications. AMD announces the new Radeon Pro cards aiming the same public.
On AMD’s side, the new Radeon Pro WX 9100 workstation graphics card is designed to excel in the most demanding media and entertainment, and design and manufacturing workloads. Delivering up to 12.3 TFLOPS of peak single precision compute performance, says AMD, “the Radeon Pro WX 9100 graphics card represents a new era of professional graphics capabilities fueled by powerful Next-Gen Compute Units with Rapid Packed Math and an Enhanced Geometry Pipeline which improves processing efficiencies. Compared to the AMD FirePro W9100 the Radeon Pro WX 9100 runs models more than twice as fast, delivering over 2.6X the peak throughput-per-clock.”
The Radeon Pro WX 9100 uses 16GB of High-Bandwidth Cache based on the newest, ultra-fast HBM2 Error Correcting Code (ECC) Memory, and harnesses the revolutionary High Bandwidth Cache Controller (HBCC), the world’s most advanced GPU memory architecture. At SIGGRAPH, AMD demonstrated how the new memory system powers extraordinary workflows not possible before, showcasing a complex scene in Radeon ProRender that easily exceeded on-card memory capacity but ran smoothly as the HBCC automatically extended local memory. The same scene, claims AMD, “would not load on competing offerings because of an out-of-memory error. When working with large data sets and complex models, as local GPU memory is exceeded, the Radeon WX 9100 continues delivering smooth performance and low CPU usage.”
The Radeon Pro WX 9100 represents a dramatic improvement over AMD’s previous generation graphics card, boasting 51% more memory bandwidth, 2.6X performance/Watt, 2.3X the compute performance, and a wide range of API support including Vulkan 1.0, OpenGL 4.5, OpenCL 2.0, and DirectX 12.1, and the latest display technologies including support for 8K at 60Hz, 4K at 120Hz, and DisplayPort 1.4 HDR-ready7 with support for up to six displays using AMD Eyefinity Technology. To demonstrate the computational superiority of the Radeon Pro WX 9100, AMD demonstrated at Siggraph real-time raytracing using Radeon ProRender paired with Unreal Engine 4. As the scene was loaded in Unreal, the Radeon Pro WX 9100 computed the raytraced scene in parallel.
The second car presented at Siggraph is the Radeon Pro SSG, the world’s first GPU to break the terabyte graphics memory barrier. Aware that today’s professional content creators face numerous obstacles in their workflows, and while the GPU and storage ingredients exist to address them in theory, in practice there has been no solution that brings them together, AMD developed the Radeon Pro SSG, to solve those obstacles with a fundamental shift in the science of PC technology, with high-speed, high-capacity NVMe devices onboard the graphics card.
Featuring the same performance and features of the Radeon Pro WX 9100, the Radeon Pro SSG is the first graphics card to offer 2TB of graphics memory, enabling smooth, native 8K video editing in real-time. AMD demonstrated at Siggraph how the Radeon Pro SSG effortlessly scrubbed through raw 8K content in Adobe Premiere Pro providing near instantaneous access to any position in the video. The Radeon Pro SSG card empowers the editors to play back, manipulate, stitch and post-process raw 8K content as easily as today’s 4K workflows and represents a fundamental shift in hardware for those who deal with big data sets. Leading ISVs are adapting their software to make the most of this next-generation architecture.
The massive high-speed memory of the Radeon Pro SSG combined with the “Vega” GPU architecture’s immense computation capabilities also enables stunning next-generation workflows, unlocking huge data sets and real-time responsiveness. At Siggraph 2017 AMD demonstrated a massive uncompressed lightfield data set of a kitchen, fully navigable in real-time.
Both the Radeon Pro WX 9100 and Radeon Pro SSG are designed by AMD and engineered with a consistent bill of materials and the highest quality components offering stable, reliable performance. A three-year limited warranty and optional seven-year limited warranty is offered on the retail version of the Radeon Pro WX 9100, and a two-year limited warranty is offered on the Radeon Pro SSG.
The Radeon Pro WX 9100 and Radeon Pro SSG graphics cards’ planned availability is September 13. The expected MSRP of the Radeon Pro WX 9100 is $2,199 and the expected MSRP of the Radeon Pro SSG is $6,999.