AMD’s Affordable Workstation Vega: Radeon Pro WX 8200 Review

[PAGETITLE=Introduction & Testing References][Top Ad] I posted an in-depth look at AMD's Radeon ProRender renderer last week, and in that article, I mentioned that the workstation side of Radeon has been on fire as of late. New ProRender versions are coming out left and right, and in August, we were even greeted to a brand-new Radeon Pro GPU: the WX 8200. With the name "WX 8200", the card is a bit of an oddball given the (X)100 naming seen before it. With the 8200, AMD effectively introduces the second release cycle for Radeon Pro, though I'm not sure it's safe to call it "second gen". Nor would I want to call it that - the WX 8200 is similar in hardware to the RX Vega 56, and the WX 9100 is like a Vega 64 - both are of the same generation. Nonetheless, the WX 8200 offers a lot for its price-point in the workstation market. It's capped at 8GB memory, which might throw some off, but it's at least ECC (error correction), which is not something we see at the $1,000 price-point often (or ever?). With 3,584 Vega cores under-the-hood, the WX 8200 is no slouch when it comes to raw performance, either for compute, or gaming. The only cards in AMD's Radeon Pro lineup to beat out the WX 8200 in performance would be the WX 9100 and SSG. Both of those cards have 4,096 cores, and a full 16GB of memory. The SSG is special in that it has 2TB of SSD storage on the card itself (four drives in RAID 0), allowing the GPU to get even closer to the project cache (eg: with Adobe Premiere Pro), in effect removing a middleman in the transfer. AMD's Radeon Pro Workstation GPU Lineup Cores Base MHz Peak FP32 Memory Bandwidth TDP Price SSG 9 4096 1440 12.3 TFLOPS 16 GB 8 484 GB/s 260W $6999 WX 9100 4096 1200 12.3 TFLOPS 16 GB 8 484 GB/s 230W $1399 WX 8200 3584 1200 10.8 TFLOPS 8 GB 8 512 GB/s 230W $999 Frontier 4096 1382 13.1 TFLOPS 16 GB 4 484 GB/s 300W $499 Pro Duo 2304 x2 1243 5.7 TFLOPS 32 GB 3 448 GB/s 250W $449 WX 7100 2304 1188 5.73 TFLOPS 8 GB 3 224 GB/s 130W $549 WX 5100 1792 713 3.89 TFLOPS 8 GB 3 160 GB/s 75W $359 WX 4100 1024 1125 2.46 TFLOPS 4 GB 3 96 GB/s 50W $259 WX 3100 512 925 1.25 TFLOPS 4 GB 3 96 GB/s 50W $169 WX 2100 512 925 1.25 TFLOPS 2 GB 3 56 GB/s 50W $129 Notes 1 GDDR6; 2 GDDR5X; 3 GDDR5; 4 HBM2 5 GDDR6 (ECC); 6 GDDR5X (ECC); 7 GDDR5 (ECC); 8 HBM2 (ECC) 9 Includes 2TB of solid-state storage on-card. Architecture: WX 2100~7100 = Polaris; WX 8200, 9100 & SSG = Vega Tested GPUs are italicized The WX 8200 is a great all-around card thanks to its $999 price-point and the amount of performance it offers. It's not going to beat out the competition in all tests, but it performs extremely well in a few tests. For comparison's sake, the performance results here also include the Vega 64, so we can easily see which tests benefit from RPro performance optimizations, and which don't. I remember when the WX 9100 launched at $2,199, but here we are, with the same card being sold regularly for around $1,399. Even before looking at the results, I'd have to wager that if I were choosing to go with a WX 8200, I'd think long and hard about whether or not I'd ever want more than 8GB of memory, and the extra performance. You don't gain an enormous amount by stepping up to the WX 9100, but it's what I'd consider the more future-proofed card. Test PC & What We Test. On the following pages, the results of our WS GPU test gauntlet will be seen. The tests chosen cover a wide-range of scenarios, from rendering to compute, and includes the use of both synthetic benchmarks and tests with real-world applications from the likes of Adobe and Autodesk. 14 GPUs are being tested for this article, although because we had a second TITAN Xp on-hand, dual-GPU results will also appear throughout. If the dual-GPU configuration isn't found in a chart, it means there was no performance scaling whatsoever across the multiple cards. Here are the specs of the test machine: Techgage Workstation Test System Processor Intel Core i9-7980XE (18-core; 2.6GHz) Motherboard ASUS ROG STRIX X299-E GAMING Memory HyperX FURY (4x16GB; DDR4-2666 16-18-18) Graphics AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 8GB (18.10.1) AMD Radeon RX 580 8GB (Red Devil; 18.10.1) AMD Radeon Pro WX 8200 8GB (18.Q3.1) AMD Radeon Pro WX 7100 8GB (18.Q3.1) AMD Radeon Pro WX 5100 4GB (18.Q3.1) AMD Radeon Pro WX 4100 4GB (18.Q3.1) AMD Radeon Pro WX 3100 4GB (18.Q3.1) NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti 11GB (NVIDIA FE; 416.34) NVIDIA TITAN Xp 12GB (416.34) NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti 11GB (416.34) NVIDIA Quadro P6000 24GB (416.30) NVIDIA Quadro P5000 16GB (416.30) NVIDIA Quadro P4000 8GB (416.30) NVIDIA Quadro P2000 5GB (416.30) Audio Onboard Storage Kingston KC1000 960GB M.2 SSD Power Supply Corsair 80 Plus Gold AX1200 Chassis Corsair Carbide 600C Inverted Full-Tower Cooling NZXT Kraken X62 AIO Liquid Cooler Et cetera Windows 10 Pro build 17763 (1809) For an in-depth pictorial look at this build, head here. Benchmark results are categorized and spread across the next four pages. On page 2, Adobe's Premiere Pro and MAGIX's Vegas Pro lead our encoding tests, with both AVC and HEVC codecs taken care of. On the same page, Sandra's financial and scientific performance can be seen, as well as the cryptography. On page 3, a few renderers are taken care of. These include the popular open-source design suite Blender, as well as LuxMark, and Radeon ProRender. ProRender is being tested with the help of 3ds Max, a suite that normally handles Redshift and V-Ray as well - but alas, neither work (or work well) on AMD graphics cards. Page 4 is home to viewport performance, covered with the help of SPEC and its SPECviewperf suite, as well as Cadalyst, and its namesake AutoCAD test. In total, 9 test results are featured here, covering important design suites like CATIA, SolidWorks, Siemens NX, Creo, as well as Autodesk's 3ds Max and Maya. Finally, page 5 is home to a couple of gaming tests (more for sanity checks, since gaming isn't going to be a huge focus here), as well as final thoughts. So without further ado, let’s get this train moving. [PAGEBREAK][PAGETITLE=Adobe Premiere Pro, MAGIX Vegas & Sandra: Crypto, Financial & Scientific] Adobe Premiere Pro. With the straight-forward 4K to 1080p encode, all of the big cards perform essentially the same. When a real project is brought into the mix, the cards get separated up a lot more. Both the Vega 64 and WX 8200 perform the same, and NVIDIA's Quadro P4000 beats out both in the Techgage encode. With the 8K to 4K encode, it becomes easier to understand that you definitely want some decent horsepower if your goal is video work in Premiere Pro. The smaller cards struggle, making Quadro P4000+ or Radeon Pro WX 8200+ an ideal match - though a gaming card like the RX 580 does not fall that far behind, realistically. MAGIX Vegas Pro. We've seen strong performance from AMD in MAGIX's Vegas Pro before, and that continues to be the case with the latest version - for the most part. Interestingly, while I thought that the Taipei 101 project was the more grueling of the two here AMD's cards struggled with the Air Canada one overall. There, the lowly Quadro P2000 managed to outperform a relative beast like the WX 8200. With the Taipei project, AMD's strengths return. Cryptography, Financial & Scientific Performance. Is it a surprise that AMD performs so well in cryptography? Here, the Vega 64 slides just in behind the RTX 2080 Ti, and ahead of the TITAN Xp. The WX 8200, meanwhile, jeers that same TITAN Xp from a short distance away. Fantastic performance overall. AMD continues to perform great in the scientific test, sitting behind the Vega 64 and ahead of every GeForce and Radeon - save for the Turing-based RTX 2080 Ti. What matters most with this kind of performance is the speed of the GPU, but AMD clearly has certain optimizations for this workload that NVIDIA doesn't. Or, it at least doesn't have enough to redeem itself here. You know... ignoring the fact that the RTX 2080 Ti dominates here. That doesn't explain the faster TITAN Xp falling behind the WX 8200, though. With the financial test, AMD's cards do not perform quite as strongly. Here, NVIDIA absolutely slaughters the entire collection with the RTX 2080 Ti performing better than dual TITAN Xps. The financial score is an aggregate result of three algorithm tests, involving Black-Scholes, Binomial, and Monte Carlo. With Black-Scholes, the 2080 Ti performs beyond the TITAN Xp what you'd expect, but performance in Binomial and Monte Carlo is literally doubled, hence the domination here. [PAGEBREAK][PAGETITLE=Blender, LuxMark & Radeon ProRender] Blender. Recent AMD CPUs and GPUs alike love Blender's Cycles renderer, and the best proof of that is seen near the top: the Radeon RX Vega 64 beat out every one of NVIDIA's GPUs. That even includes the TITAN Xp. The WX 8200 is similar hardware to a Vega 56, and it places about where I'd expect. It sits real close to NVIDIA's Pascal-based Quadro P6000. As the TITAN Xp is the technically more powerful card of the two, AMD clearly has some great optimizations going on with this popular design tool. WX 8200 even beats out NVIDIA's Quadro P5000, a GPU that costs about $1,700 at the current time (though it has 16GB of VRAM). The WX 9100 (cue "if I had one!" meme) would overlap Vega 64's positioning, giving AMD a strong lead in this suite overall. LuxMark. There are a few things to talk about here. For starters, the results at the bottom are correct: the WX 3100 for some reason performed better in the LuxBall render over the WX 4100, despite the opposite being true for the Hotel render. Beyond that, everything else scales pretty much as expected. The WX 8200 performs directly behind the TITAN Xp in the LuxBall render, and a bit behind the Vega 64 in the Hotel render, as we'd expect. Unfortunately for AMD, NVIDIA's new Turing RTX cards appear to be really good at LuxMark. Compared to the GTX 1080 Ti, the RTX 2080 Ti scores almost double the LuxBall score, and about 70% more in the Hotel score. It might be a good...

AMD’s Affordable Workstation Vega: Radeon Pro WX 8200 Review

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Rob Williams