AMD has introduced the first members of the Radeon Pro W6000 family: the W6800 and W6600 graphics cards and the W6600M GPU for mobile computers.
The Radeon Pro W6800 is "the most powerful workstation graphics card AMD has constructed," according to AMD workstation GPU product management director Scott Jackson.
The double-width card includes a 32GB frame buffer and is intended for heavy to extreme workloads, he said. It performs at up to 17.83 FP32 TFLOPS thanks to its 3840 stream processors, and can drive up to six monitors via its mini DisplayPort interfaces.
The W6800 is said to be significantly quieter than Nvidia's RTC 5000. In AMD's testing, the boards were measured at 45.9 and 52.0 dBA respectively.
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But the expected street price of US$2249 is "fairly aggressive" and is intended to get the W6800 "into a broader set of hands."
The single-width Radeon Pro W6600 is expected to cost US$649. With an 8GB frame buffer and 1792 stream processors delivering up to 10.40 FP32 TFLOPS, it's said to be good for medium to heavy workloads.
The W6000 series is based on AMD's RDNA 2 architecture, which includes hardware raytracing, L3 cache, and PCIe 4.0 x16 support. This gives RDNA 2 up to 79% higher performance than the previous generation.
Like all Radeon Pro products, the new cards are built with "very high quality, reliable components" that have been tested for demanding requirements, said Jackson.
Models are becoming more complex, so higher performance hardware is needed to render them in one piece.
The W6800 is already certified for a range of popular applications including Solidworks, Autodesk Maya and Revit, AutoCAD and Bentley MicroStation.
According to AMD, it provides significant performance improvements over previous hardware. For example, the company claims the W6800 is on average up to 40% better than the Nvidia RTX 5000 for running Lumion 11.0.
"Fast and capable graphics cards are essential to tapping into the full potential of Lumion," said Lumion customer experience manager Miguel Budesca.
"With the Radeon Pro W6800, anyone looking to render huge and complex scenes is going to be pleased with the possibilities offered by 32GB of graphics card memory."
The W6000 series includes full support for DX12 and Vulkan, and for the AV1 codec.
The Radeon Pro Viewport Boost feature requires explicit support by applications, but is capable of delivering a substantial increase in 4K viewport navigation FPS – up to twice the performance on Autodesk Revit, and around 40% improvement with Autodesk 3ds Mac and Epic Twinmotion.
This gives a "completely natural" and "much more immersive experience," said AMD director of software product management Glen Matthews.
Dassault Systemes Solidworks director of graphics and advanced visualising Siddharth Palaniappan said "The Solidworks graphics team and AMD are collaborating to achieve the very best viewport quality. For this we chose real-time raytracing using Vulkan to improve visual fidelity."
One of the companies to receive early samples of the W6000 family is CCM Motorcycles, which uses it to run Solidworks.
"There is one downside to this new [Radeon Pro W6800] workstation, however... it makes everything else seem frustratingly slow and underpowered by comparison," according to senior design engineer Owen Davies.
The W6800 is already shipping to distributors, and the W6600 will follow in early July.
The W6600M will start shipping in laptops later this year, with HP as AMD's lead partner.
