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

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.

Unlike in GPU rendering, where great scaling between GPUs can be easily seen (as evidenced on the previous page with the ProRender tests), figuring out the perks of a faster graphics card in video encoding can be tough. If you look at the two Quadros here, there was a point of ceased returns on the 4K encode, but huge gains could still be seen in the music video project on the faster card, thanks to its thorough use of GPU accelerated filters.

Overall, WX 3100 performance is great for its price point within AMD’s own lineup. But as far as AMD vs. NVIDIA goes, the ~$400 P2000 performed almost as well as the $620 WX 7100. As I like to say, it really pays to understand your workload, and right now, Premiere Pro works real well on Quadro. If anyone out there has suggestions on other video encode tests I could include that might make better use of AMD’s graphics cards, please holler.

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).

As with Premiere Pro, AutoCAD runs faster on Quadro, which I presume is the reason I almost never hear AMD utter the software’s name. Thanks to our friends at SPEC, though, we get to see the performance from numerous other high-end CAD apps, which you’ll enjoy in 3… 2… 1… (psst: click to the next page!)