AMD Radeon Pro WX 5100 & WX 4100 Workstation GPUs Review

[PAGETITLE=Introduction][Top Ad] April 30, 2018 Addendum: Updated performance can be found here. 2017 might have just begun, but it's a secret to no one that AMD has a massive year planned, one that could be integral to its future success. Its Vega-based Radeon GPUs are expected to launch in the next couple of months, and the same applies to its hugely anticipated Ryzen processors. And, lest we forget AMD's workstation focus: Radeon Pros will be an important part of AMD's 2017, as well. When AMD announced its Radeon Pro series last summer, you could almost hear the collective sigh of relief. Leading up to that point, many had wondered exactly what was going to happen with AMD's FirePro line, as revolutionary releases were nowhere to be seen. With Radeon Pro, AMD ushered in a proper successor to FirePro, complementing its recharged focus. A major new release for AMD's workstation graphics is notable enough, but what makes all three of these new models stand out is their affordability. If you can't shell out $2,000+ for a workstation card, AMD has got you covered with its $799 WX 7100, sporting 8GB of VRAM. At the bottom is the $399 WX 4100, a low-profile offering. The middle slot belongs to the $499 WX 5100, which like the WX 4100, doesn't require a power connector. We'll be taking an in-depth look at the WX 7100 soon, but for this article, the focus will be on the bottom rungs: WX 5100 and WX 4100. AMD Radeon Pro Series Performance Clock Cores Memory Length Power WX 7100 5.7 TFLOPs 1243MHz 2304 8192MB 9.5" <130W WX 5100 3.9 TFLOPs 1086MHz 1792 8192MB 6.8" <75W WX 4100 2.4 TFLOPs 1201MHz 1024 4096MB 6.6" (LP) <50W Considering the modest differences in price, and differences in performance, the Radeon Pro WX 5100 stands to be the most popular choice of these three for most users, although as I'm not a psychic, I could be a little off. One thing's for certain: you stand to gain a lot when moving from the WX 4100 to WX 7100. It's double the price, but it's more than twice the performance. You don't see that kind of performance / price gain too often in the workstation market. That said, AMD squarely targets each one of these three GPUs at a slightly different market, so if you're not sure which one best-suits you, you should have no questions left in a moment: The WX 4100 is excellent for CAD work, with AMD even going as far as to call it "Best in Class" for that purpose. You should have no performance hassles whatsoever when designing your CAD environments. The WX 5100 is suited for those who plan to do a fair amount of rendering. We're not talking full-blown scenes here, but rather rendering of simpler scenes or perhaps of a complex object without a scene (sculpting would be a good example). As you'd expect with a GPU right in the middle of the other two, the WX 5100 is ideal for those who want better performance than what the WX 4100 can provide without going over $500. The WX 7100 is the big gun, the one designed for all sorts of rendering, including VR. In fact, AMD calls this an ideal GPU for VR content development, as its gaming prowess is enough to let the designers test out their own content. Both the creation and playback performance on this card will be more than sufficient for most customers. For those with heavier needs, multiple WX 7100s could be installed in the same workstation (up to 4 - providing 20 TFLOPS+ performance for $3,200). One thing worth noting is that while gaming is not the big focus of AMD's Radeon Pro line, the performance you see on each card should be similar to one of the company's gaming-focused Radeon RX line. The WX 7100, for example, is similar in design to the RX 480, but it has one cool trick under its sleeves: it's single-slot. That said, if gaming is an important feature of your workstation card, you'll definitely want to opt for the WX 7100 for the best overall performance. It can handle 1080p games with ease, and 1440p with some settings tweaks. On the topic of gaming, one excellent feature AMD ported over from its Radeon driver is ReLive, a software solution that takes advantage of GPU horsepower to record your display with minimal impact. While recording gameplay is an obvious use of this tool, AMD notes that it's also ideal for recording video for later use in training. Or, if you're as forgetful as I am, it's also a good way to record a certain workflow for future reference. Before jumping into the performance data, it needs to be mentioned that AMD offers two different Radeon Pro drivers for customers to choose from. The "Enterprise" version is the hardened version, designed for those who don't plan to upgrade more than once per three months, and aim to make their environment as stable as possible. While the other driver, "Crimson ReLive", is undoubtedly stable, it's not likely to meet most corporate guidelines for production drivers. If you have a say in which driver you can use, you'd want to opt for Crimson, as it will always offer the cutting-edge performance enhancements. Fortunately, the just-released 17.Q1 Enterprise driver just added ReLive, so enterprise users can enjoy it, too. Testing The Radeon Pro WX 5100 & WX 4100. On the following pages, we'll be putting AMD's Radeon Pro WX 5100 and WX 4100 through a gauntlet of real-world and synthetic tests, utilizing apps from Autodesk, Adobe, SPEC, SiSoftware, and a handful of others (including light gaming tests for good measure). All tests are run at least twice to produce an accurate result, and if for some reason an odd result creeps up, we do a third run. In the case of this particular review, no tests had to go that route, as most of the benchmarks are very good at delivering similar results with each repeated run. Our Windows 7 Ultimate x64 test OS has a couple of key Windows services disabled (Search, Defender, Firewall, and Update), as well as Aero. During all testing, the display is kept in 4K resolution, with two exceptions: SPECapc Maya 2012 and SPECviewperf are run with a 1080p resolution. Further, Vsync, G-SYNC, and FreeSync are disabled. Our test system is as follows: Techgage Workstation Test System Processor Intel Core i7-5960X (8-core; 3GHz) Motherboard ASUS X99-DELUXE Memory Corsair Vengeance 32GB (8x4GB; DDR3-2133 11-12-11) Graphics NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN X 12GB (GeForce 353.30) NVIDIA Quadro M6000 12GB (Quadro 352.86) NVIDIA Quadro M2000 4GB (Quadro 362.13) NVIDIA Quadro K5200 8GB (Quadro 353.30) NVIDIA Quadro K5000 4GB (Quadro 353.30) AMD Radeon Pro WX 5100 8GB (16.12.1) AMD Radeon Pro WX 4100 4GB (16.12.1) AMD FirePro W4300 4GB (FirePro 15.201) Audio Onboard Storage Kingston HyperX 3K 480GB SSD Power Supply Cooler Master Silent Pro Hybrid 1300W Chassis Cooler Master Storm Trooper Cooling Thermaltake WATER3.0 Extreme Liquid Displays Acer XB280HK 28" 4K G-SYNC Monitor Et cetera Windows 7 Professional 64-bit With that all covered, it's time to jump into the test results. [PAGEBREAK][PAGETITLE=Rendering: Autodesk 3ds Max, LuxMark & Cinebench] Autodesk 3ds Max 2017. Not all 3ds Max projects are going to utilize the GPU by default, but if they're designed from the get-go with NVIDIA's Iray or AMD's brand-new ProRender in mind, the performance and shadow/lighting quality gains can be immense. At this point in time, NVIDIA's Iray plugin does not work with competitor GPUs, although AMD's ProRender can. However, I ran into a couple of roadblocks while testing Quadro on ProRender that ruled out comparisons at this point in time, and I'm not sure whether the exact project was to blame, or something else. Other testing led me to believe that ProRender is a fair OpenCL benchmark for testing different architectures, although due to the roadblock I encountered, I couldn't include such results in this particular review. If ProRender does end up proving to run without issue on both vendors' GPUs, it could become a regular part of our WS GPU testing. That said, while the WX 7100 wasn't the focus of this review, I did haul it out in order to get some ProRender results, so that our performance chart is a little more useful. The WX 7100 will get its own review later. Both projects used for testing come straight from AMD, with one being a render of a Nissan GT-R, and another of a villa. These scenes are rendered at 1080p, capped at 100 iterations (these iterations scale differently from Iray and are not comparable). An example of the Nissan project can be seen below (captured in 3ds Max 2016; but our testing was ultimately conducted with 2017). It's no surprise, but the WX 7100 has dominated here, performing a lot better than the WX 5100, and leading us to believe that there could be a gap for AMD to fill later - perhaps with a WX 6100. The WX 5100 is considerably faster than the WX 4100, as well, performing better than its 20% price premium over the 4100 would suggest. As I mentioned earlier, the WX 5100 could become the "sweet spot" GPU, although it's hard to ignore the major gains a WX 7100 can provide. At least both GPUs do include an 8GB framebuffer - the WX 4100's 4GB could prove limiting in such rendering scenarios. Synthetic: Cinebench & LuxMark. To compare our collection of WS GPUs across other renderers, we rely on Cinebench, and LuxMark. The latter is of particular interest as it renders using OpenCL. It also happens to be so good at what it does that we opt to use it for the sake of generating peak temperature and power information. Before we can even finish our first results page, we have some incredibly interesting numbers to discuss. In Cinebench, the M2000 proved just as fast as the WX 5100, and a fair bit better than the WX 4100. The tables turn in LuxMark, however. Overall, NVIDIA's Maxwell-based Quadro M2000 is in the same league as the WX 5100, but in the ray trace-focused LuxMark, the two are nowhere close to each other in performance. Even the lowbie WX 4100 decimated the M2000. It'll be quite interesting to see the results when NVIDIA decides to release its lower-end Pascal cards...

AMD Radeon Pro WX 5100 & WX 4100 Workstation GPUs Review

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Rob Williams