Radeon Pro vs. Quadro: A Fresh Look At Workstation GPU Performance

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 three of the GPU ones are focused on: Cryptography, Financial Analysis, and Scientific Analysis. Some of the results are a bit too complex for a graph, so a handful of tables are coming your way.

Cryptography

It’s hard to talk about these results without first drawing attention to the top: Vega 64 manages to match SLI’d TITAN Xps (which actually scale properly) in both the encrypt/decrypt process, improves-upon the crypto test against the TITAN Xp, and comes close to the same GPU for the hashing test. Where crypto and hashing are concerned, nothing can touch the dual-GPU test, but this will come as a surprise to no GPU miner.

For cryptography, AMD easily wins here. The company must care an awful lot about crypto, because we’ve seen similar gains on the Ryzen side of things as well. For a fun comparison, look at the WX 3100 versus the Vega 64. The difference is close to being 1:10, but of course, they target very different customer bases. Even so, there’s a lot of value to be had from Vega.

Financial Analysis

Not a single one of the GPUs featured here supports proper double-precision performance (like a Radeon Instinct, NVIDIA Tesla, or Quadro GP100/GV100 would provide), so all of the performance on that side of the fence is kind of pointless, because no one revolves their work around FP64 and opts for capped hardware. That said, when we compare the Vega 64 to 1080 Ti, there are some clear advantages from the red team.

For the most part, raw performance pretty much dictates the ranking here, so NVIDIA’s TITAN Xp keeps glued to the top for the single-precision tests. The rest of the cards slot in pretty much where we’d expect. Neither vendor seems to have exclusive optimizations for these computations, but overall, Vega 64 once again brings some great performance for its (SRP) price point.

Scientific Analysis

Once again, the Vega 64 proved one of the mightiest options for the double-precision test, and it battles nicely with the (technically) faster GTX 1080 Ti. For single-precision, a single TITAN Xp proves best, but the more, the merrier: the scaling seen is fantastic.