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

On the previous page, I mentioned that SPEC is an organization that crafts some of the best, most comprehensive benchmarks going, and in a similar vein, I can compliment SiSoftware. This is a company that thrives on offering support for certain technologies before those technologies are even available to the consumer. In that regard, its Sandra benchmark might seem a little bleeding-edge, but at the same time, its tests are established, refined, and accurate across multiple runs.

While Sandra offers a huge number of benchmarks, just four of the GPU ones are focused on: Cryptography, Financial Analysis, Scientific Analysis, and also memory bandwidth. Some of the results are a bit too complex for a graph, so a handful of tables are coming your way.

Cryptography

Regardless of your encryption needs, the WX 3100 is going to deliver extremely good performance for its price point. NVIDIA has an enormous gain in the hashing scheme of things, but the WX 7100 kills it on the encrypt/decrypt side. What’s up with the WX 5100 coming below the WX 4100, you ask? It’s a bit of an odd duck: it performs great overall, and just where I’d expect it to, but in certain tests, it lags behind. Either an architectural gotcha, or a sign that the card should have a power connector.

Financial Analysis

SPECwpc on the previous page showed absolutely zero deviation between GPUs in its financial test, but Sandra proves that scaling is just fine as long as the workloads can take advantage of them. NVIDIA’s got the Monte Carlo game locked down, but the Radeon Pros are extremely competitive with the other algorithms.

Scientific Analysis

Once again, AMD exhibits strong performance with the WX 3100 here, performing quite close in parts to its bigger brother, the WX 4100.

Bandwidth

The WX 3100 performs very well against its big bro in this bandwidth test, and while these values don’t align with vendor-provided ones, they scale much the same way.