Navi For Workstation: A Performance Review Of AMD’s Radeon Pro W5700

Blender

It’s not wise to take the performance from one workload and expect that it’ll scale the same way in another. In some cases, even different projects inside of the same application can scale quite a bit differently, something we’re seeing proof of with the results above. In the BMW test, which has become a standard Blender benchmark, NVIDIA’s GPUs prove to be faster than AMD’s Navi-based models, but the roles reverse in the more complex Classroom scene, albeit to a smaller degree.

The results above take care of Cycles, but what about the new-to-2.80 Eevee?

Our Eevee results seem to agree with the scaling of the Cycles / BMW test, in that NVIDIA’s comparative cards edge out AMD’s. What’s incredibly clear is that the older lower-end cards leave a lot to be desired. If you’re running a graphics card over two, and especially three years old, you are going to be enjoying a serious performance uptick when you finally upgrade (and you might just be overdue).

In the Eevee render, the Radeon Pro W5700 finishes behind the RX 5700 XT, which is to be expected, given its extra cores. At the same time, it’s hard to figure out why the RX 5700 XT didn’t win the BMW and Classroom tests, or likewise why the W5700 won. It’s certainly not the first time we’ve seen odd scaling like this, and it won’t be the last.

To keep things organized better, Blender viewport performance can be found on the dedicated page, which happens to be page four.

LuxMark

We’re continuing to see some great variation in the results with LuxMark. NVIDIA’s Quadro RTX 4000 has made it to the top, while the W5700 and RX 5700 XT swap places depending on the test. We’re glad to see that the instance of the same switch-up seen in the Blender test between these two GPUs has carried over to another test – so it’s not just a fluke. How the W5700 ever manages to come ahead with fewer cores, we’re not sure, but it bodes well for a potential 5700 XT-equivalent card in the future.

Unfortunately, this wraps up our rendering tests for the W5700. We’ve been without working Radeon ProRender tests for many months, so we’re still forced to continue ignoring that one for now. If you happen to be a ProRender user who wouldn’t donating a working ProRender project for us to use in our benchmarks (with full credit given), please leave a comment. Likewise, if you’re a Radeon user who works with a renderer we don’t cover, we’d love to hear about it.