Just when you thought the old 28nm GPUs had nothing left to give, AMD releases an update to one of its workstation cards. The FirePro W9100 will soon come packed with a rather hefty 32GB of GDDR5 memory, up from the original 16GB.
With both 4K resolution and Virtual Reality making traction in the market, it’s put greater demand on asset management and processing. If you are working with such large data pools, memory becomes a huge problem. While 4K certainly brings about problems with textures and on-screen material rendering, VR has its own unique challenges as scenes need to be rendered at progressive detail levels and often with 360-degree views.
The new FirePro W9100 keeps the same stats as its 16GB predecessor – 5.24 TFLOPS FP32 and 2.62 TFLOPS of FP64, 320GB/s memory bandwidth on a 512-bit bus. It supports the full range of modern APIs such as DirectX 11.2 and 12, OpenCL 2.0, and the usual collection of AMD extensions.
AMD wants to take the opportunity as well to help muscle in on NVIDIA’s physically based renderer, Iray, with its own extension set, FireRender. We’d like to point out now that you are likely to see these real-time renderers mentioned more often in the future, thanks in a large part to VR. FireRender sees to the same type of solution as Iray, by providing very-fast iterative renders using physical modeling to generate quick and realistic renders of scenes and objects (you can find out more with our related Iray article). With enough processing and memory thrown into the mix, a stack of these cards could provide the grunt for real-time ray-tracing, suitable for VR demos of new car purchases.
Both AMD and NVIDIA have their respective new GPU architectures around the corner (Polaris and Pascal), but we won’t expect to see new workstation cards for quite some time (NVIDIA’s Tesla P100 is a compute card, and only available as part of the DGX-1 Server setup right now), and most of those will feature smaller frame-buffers (or limited to 16GB if they decide to use HBM2), so the ‘late’ release to the upgraded 32GB W9100 is not going to affect the new generation market for some time. AMD’s other latest GPU, the S9300x2 is a bit of a one-trick pony, despite using the newer Fiji-based core, since the HBM memory limits it to just 4GB per core (8GB total for the card).
So if you are in need of some serious memory management on your rendering assets, the 32GB W9100 is a greatĀ option right now.