AMD Workstation GPU Buyers Guide

What is an AMD workstation GPU?

The GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) is the central component of a graphics card or GPU-accelerator and is critical for speeding up visualisation and compute workloads. This is achieved by offloading these workloads from the CPU and system memory into the GPU and GPU memory, where the architecture is much more parallel in nature - allowing many tasks to be performed simultaneously. Workstation GPUs are also often referred to as professional or enterprise-grade due to the higher calibre of components used when compared to consumer GPUs.

AMD names its workstation GPUs Radeon Pro to differentiate them from its Radeon gaming GPUs. AMD workstation GPUs are designed for the rendering of high resolution images and video concurrently - both hugely parallel workloads, and because GPUs can perform parallel operations on multiple sets of data, they are also perfect for non-graphical tasks such as scientific computing and the development of machine learning and AI models.

What makes AMD workstation GPUs special

AMD workstation GPUs feature a whole host of extra features and capabilities that their consumer counterparts lack.

Certified Drivers

Certified Drivers ISVs such as Autodesk, Dassault and Siemens certify their applications, ensuring optimal stability backed by enterprise-class customer support.

Enterprise Class

Enterprise-class components ensure better reliability and resiliency, reducing failure rates especially when used at full load for longer periods of time.

ECC Memory

Error correcting code (ECC) memory acts to protect data from corruption, so any errors are eradicated prior to them affecting the workload being processed.

Extended Memory

Larger onboard frame buffers than consumer GPUs enable larger and more complex renders and compute simulations to be processed.

Inbuilt Security

AMD Secure Processor technology helps protect sensitive data and validate code before it is executed, protecting your system & data from unauthorised software and applications.

The AMD workstation GPU range

The following table gives an overview of which GPUs are most suitable for different workloads, ranging from architecture, construction and engineering (AEC) to building information management (BIM); computer aided design (CAD) to computer aided engineering (CAE) and computational fluid dynamics (CFD). We also cover media and entertainment (M&E), rendering, virtual reality (VR) and machine learning (ML), deep learning (DL) and artificial intelligence (AI).

	W7900	W7800	W6800	W7700	W7600	W6600	W7500	W6400
AEC / BIM	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
CAD	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
CAE / CFD	Yes	Yes	Yes	no	Yes	Yes	no	no
M&E	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
RENDERING	Yes	Yes	Yes	no	no	no	no	no
VR	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
ML / DL / AI	Yes	Yes	no	no	no	no	no	no

Going into more detail, we have ranked each card from highest to lowest performing with additional information on their architecture, cores, memory and performance for a number of tasks. The visualisation score tells you how good a GPU is for design, modelling and how fast it is at rendering; whereas the computational scores are ranked for tasks such as simulation, deep learning and AI workloads. These are split into calculation type - FP32 (single precision) and FP16 (half-precision), as some workloads rely on a specific type.

Radeon Pro W7900

The W7900 is the most powerful high-end card in the Radeon Pro W7000 range. Based on the RDNA 3 architecture, the W7900 has 6,144 stream processors and 96 ray accelerators plus 48GB of ultra-reliable GDDR6 ECC memory. The W7900 features 96MB of L3 Infinity Cache and supports four high resolution displays, making this card the perfect choice for very high-end workstations.

HI-RES

Support for 8K video projects and up to six 4K HDR displays is enabled via AMD Infinity Cache technology, allowing data that is likely to be needed and reused, to be temporarily held in high-speed GPU memory.

RAY TRACING

The Ray Accelerator is a high-performance raytracing acceleration architecture. This specialised hardware handles the intersection of rays directly on AMD Radeon Pro GPUs.

VR

AMD Radeon ReLive for VR technology means you have untethered freedom to naturally navigate your creations as you would in the real world - without worrying about wires, base stations or dedicated VR rooms.

REMOTE WORKING

Easily access the full GPU-accelerated experience of Radeon Pro graphics card-powered workstations from virtually anywhere with the remote workstation IP built into AMD Software Pro Edition.


VISUALISATION PERFORMANCE	10
Content Creation

COMPUTE PERFORMANCE (FP32)	10
Content Creation

COMPUTE PERFORMANCE (FP16)	10
Content Creation

0 5 10

REAL TIME RAY TRACING

VR READY

VIEW RANGE

Radeon Pro W7800

The W7800 is the second-most powerful card in the Radeon Pro W7000 range. Based on the RDNA 3 architecture, the W7800 has 4,480 stream processors and 70 ray accelerators plus 32GB of ultra-reliable GDDR6 ECC memory. The W7800 features 64MB of L3 Infinity Cache and supports four high resolution displays, making this card a great choice for high-end workstations.