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

When it comes to benchmarking hardware for serious use cases, there is no place better to look than SPEC. I’ve dubbed the folks there as “the masters of benchmarking”, as each one of SPEC’s tools are meticulously crafted by professionals to deliver results as relevant and accurate as possible – a goal shared by us at Techgage.

Four SPEC suites are used for testing here, starting with SPECviewperf, for viewport performance across nine applications, which is followed by SPECwpc to test five different workstation scenarios. Finally, SPECapc 3ds Max 2015 and Maya 2012 finish up the page to help us gauge performance in the respective Autodesk applications.

SPECviewperf 12.1

AMD’s WX 3100 performs extremely well in comparison to the WX 4100, which retails for $70 more. Overall, scaling remains quite good throughout the entire Radeon Pro line, although in most cases here, NVIDIA has a strong overall advantage, with the $400 P2000 outperforming the $620 WX 7100 in 33% of these tests. Let’s see how Radeon fares with a broader look:

SPECwpc 2.1

The NVIDIA onslaught continues, and doesn’t seem to want to end. It’s a sign of the fact that it’s nice to have NVIDIA’s R&D dollars, because even if the hardware is quality, it might not be enough to overcome the competition’s optimizations. Oddities like the WX 4100 performing worse than the WX 3100 in this test makes for a difficult gauging of things, too.

SPECapc 3ds Max 2015

This test helps prove that performance matters. It matters enough to prevent you from working the way you want, such as with anti-aliasing. In this test, the WX 3100 refused to complete a run of this test with 4xAA after multiple attempts, and even an OS refresh. I remember having a similar issue with last-gen’s FirePro W4300, but a reboot fixed it. That wasn’t the case here.

The interesting thing is that while AA increases VRAM use, the WX 4100 completed the test fine, and it has the same 4GB framebuffer. It’s just one of those things, I guess, and more proof that you need to understand your workload and what a particular graphics card can offer.

SPECapc Maya 2012

SPECviewperf showed NVIDIA dominate in the Maya test, and that carried over to the more thorough SPECapc Maya 2012.