AMD Announces $1,500 Radeon Pro Duo Graphics Card At GDC

At the ongoing GDC in San Francisco, AMD has been pushing hard to make sure we’re all well aware of its accomplishments, and of what’s en route. It’s talked a lot about “Capsaicin”, an umbrella term for all of individual components that are part of AMD’s GPU ecosystem. That of course includes VR, and where there’s VR, there’s usually some high-performance gear. After all, if you want great quality and great framerates, your wallet is going to have to feel some great pain.

So, how does $1,499 sound?

That’s what AMD’s next high-end card is going to cost. It’s called the Radeon Pro Duo, which is a little interesting as we all thought it’d be called the Fury X2. Despite the lack of the “Fury” name, the Pro Duo does in fact include HBM memory, and while we’re not told how much, we’d assume it’d be 4GB per GPU, as with the Fury cards.

AMD has chosen to work with MAINGEAR on the release of this card, and it’s no surprise why. Just look at this beaut:

Yup, that’s built-in GPU watercooling and not two, but three 8-pin power connectors.

While some specs are lacking right now, we do know that the Pro Duo will push 16 TFLOPs of computing power, which is double the R9 Nano (8.2 TFLOPs) and more than double the R9 Fury (7.2 TFLOPs). Such power comes with a purpose: VR. No, not just for gaming, but also for creating. In a way, AMD is catering to the same audience that might ordinarily consider FirePro cards, but the power on this single $1,500 card is so great, gaming performance should match creation performance.

With its $1,500 price tag, the Radeon Pro Duo clearly isn’t for everyone, but for those in the creation market, $1,500 could be negligible. It’d also give owners the best of both worlds: great gaming performance as well as great creation performance. That’s important, because generally speaking, FirePro and Quadro cards are not designed for the gaming side of things. That’s why some companies, like BOXX, offer configurations that include both a workstation card and a gaming one. With the Pro Duo though, AMD might not be giving a hugely tuned card to people for creation purposes (as in, it wouldn’t share the same driver-tuning that goes on with the FirePro series), the fact that it’s simply so damn fast might sway people towards it rather than a proper workstation card (or a dual-GPU PC design).

All we know for sure is, 16 TFLOPs is downright insane – in the best possible way.