AMD Radeon Pro W6800 32 GB Review - Does the new workstation graphics card beat the NVIDIA Quadro RTX 5000? | Page 15

Summary

That was a kind of light in the otherwise rather boring, because permanently green dominated workstation sky. Well, for a changing of the guard AMD would need a much larger portfolio than just a single card, but the path is already right. It’s not just a few benchmarks, but most benchmarks where the Radeon Pro W6800 holds its own against the Quadro RTX 5000. If you compare the performance with the older predecessor in the form of the W5700, then the performance is partly doubled.

On the other hand, the power consumption is moderate and the card is really efficient for what it offers. We still know this differently and AMD has really been able to make up a lot of ground here. Even if not everything is running smoothly yet, it is a nice new beginning, which above all makes you want more. Meanwhile, in the sum of all benchmarks, the card is anything but a sympathetic underdog that has to sell itself on price, on the contrary.

If there’s anything to criticize, it’s the somewhat stale cooling system. That you can also manage this as a real DHE card, which remains cool and still quite quiet, is shown by the competitor with the Quadro A6000, which can shoulder 50 watts more with almost 6 dBA less and even remains cooler overall despite the 48 GB memory. This is where AMD should get rid of the conservative designs of the long-time supplier and focus on more competition. The better radial fan of the A6000 alone shouldn’t be an exclusive witchcraft.

This is where I really wish there was a better cooling solution, as the card would definitely gain up to 150 MHz and more clock speed, it wouldn’t have to throttle constantly due to temperatures. The bottom line would be up to 5% real additional performance for free for the user, which is simply left lying around, for whatever reason. Not to mention the reliability, which comes along with it. Sure, this is complaining on a rather high level, but it must be allowed to imagine a good product even better.

Conclusion

With the Radeon Pro W6800, AMD makes an impressive return to the workstation sector, even if the portfolio is still quite thin and one would like to see more cards. It positions itself on the same level as a Quadro RTX 5000, depending on the application and driver, of course, and can even beat it in some aspects, as long as OpenCL isn’t against CUDA. Whereby e.g. Blender shows quite, what would be possible, if one only makes enough effort.

So AMD’s problems this time are not so much the hardware as such, but much more the resources available for software and driver optimization. This construction site still needs to be completed if you really want to seriously attack across the board. By the way, what NVIDIA now carries as “Studio” towards GeForce (i.e. the consumer cards) usually works out for AMD as well. That’s exactly why I excluded video and audio editing here. In fact, the consumer cards are usually faster. So it doesn’t always have to be a Radeon Pro (or Quadro RTX) if you want to be productive with the graphics hardware.

NVIDIA’s lead in “AI for all” is huge, and also owed to far greater resources for software development. However, if you are looking for a fast 3D card for realtime visualization (rasterizing) or compute applications, which can also handle more than 4 monitors if necessary, this is the first real alternative to NVIDIA in terms of a cheaper and faster solution. It would be good if it could be delivered. With a target market price of 2250 USD, it would be a little more expensive than an equally fast NVIDIA Quadro RTX 5000, which is currently available for just over 2000 Euros.

The card was provided to igorsLAB by AMD under NDA for testing with the condition not to fall below the specified release date until the AMD NDA falls. There was no possible influence of the manufacturer on the test and the results, nor was there any obligation to publish them.

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