A Look At AMD’s Radeon Pro WX 3100 Workstation Graphics Card

Autodesk 3ds Max 2017

The best use case for GPUs in rendering is using them for realistic lighting, something achieved through AMD’s ProRender and NVIDIA’s Iray ray tracing renderers. While ProRender can make use of NVIDIA’s hardware (though with a warning about a lack of optimization), the reverse isn’t true. To keep things simple, I test only AMD cards with ProRender, and Quadro cards with Iray.

This testing makes use of Autodesk 3ds Max 2017, which is the most recent version ProRender supports (the same applies to Iray). Both scenes used for testing, render with 500 iterations, giving us a nice looking result, but not a production one. The scenes include an AMD autoshow, and a cool dragon; both of which can be snagged for free from the ProRender GitHub page.

You can’t ask for better scaling than this. To put another way (and based on the vehicle scene):

This is based on current market pricing, so apparently right now is the best time to buy a WX series graphics card. If you’re a ProRender user, what you pay for a new WX right now is going to be very reflective of the overall rendering performance you’ll see. I wish all performance lineups scaled like this!

Synthetic: Cinebench R15 & LuxMark 3.1

To compare our collection of workstation graphics cards across other renderers, Cinebench R15(.038) and LuxMark 3.1 are used. The first is a good gauge of OpenGL performance in Cinema4D, whereas the latter tests the cards’ prowess for OpenCL. LuxMark is also used for gauging peak power draw (found on the final page), and while it doesn’t push the GPU as hard as a gaming benchmark does, it offers a realistic look at rendering performance-per-watt.

Cinebench R15.038

LuxMark 3.1

It’s not going to surprise anyone that the lowest-end WX card we’re looking at is going to perform like the lowest-end WX card we’re looking at, but all things considered, the card performs quite well against its bigger brother, the WX 4100. OpenGL perf in Cinema4D suffers a little bit, though more considerable gains are seen on the WX 4100 side in LuxMark.