A Look At AMD’s Radeon RX Vega 64 Workstation & Compute Performance

Adobe Premiere Pro CC 2017

To test the accelerated encoding perks of different GPUs, Adobe’s Premiere Pro CC 2017 is used. For production, the best use of GPUs is to rendering the countless number of filters, and accelerate scaling down to other resolutions. Encoding one 1080p video to another might not exhibit much of a speed-up (or one at all) on the GPU, but 4K to 1080p can often benefit.

Two projects help test two different scenarios here. The first is a 1080p project that includes a bunch of filters, while the second makes use of the open source movie Tears of Steel to resize the 3840×2160 release (a 4096×2160 version is also available) down to 1080p.

Media encoding has been NVIDIA’s (and Intel’s, for what it’s worth) forte, and that’s easily seen when you compare the lower-end Quadros to even the high-end WX 7100. Fortunately, Vega suffers no questionable performance: it keeps up with NVIDIA in one encode, and comes very close in the other.

Autodesk AutoCAD 2016 (Cadalyst 2015 5.5b)

Some of SPEC’s benchmarks on the following page take a look at CAD performance, but AutoCAD is left out. So with the help of Cadalyst, a benchmark produced by the people at the website of the same name, both 2D and 3D performance is tested (along with I/O and CPU, but that isn’t needed here).

We saw the RX Vega 64 beat out AMD’s own Pro-targeted WX series (Polaris-based, only) in Adobe Premiere Pro, and here, with AutoCAD, we see improved performance yet again. Clearly, AutoCAD is NVIDIA’s domain, which is probably why I never hear AMD utter the name, but all things considered, Vega 64 performs very well here.