AMD Announces Radeon Pro Duo – A Dual-GPU Fury For Professionals

Following up from yesterday’s news story, AMD has officially launched its latest card, a dual-GPU solution based on the Fiji architecture found in the Fury cards. The Radeon Pro Duo – its official name – has a rather unique twist in its launch, the fact that it’s not explicitly a gaming card, but one targeted at professionals.

The new Pro Duo may be a Radeon card, but AMD has other plans for it, stating it’s “a powerful merging of AMD FirePro and Radeon capabilities into a single graphics card.” This new card features an SDK for one of AMD’s new initiatives called LiquidVR, an API extension dedicated to all things Virtual Reality which we’ll get into a little later. It also allows for AMD’s FireRender, which is the equivalent to NVIDIA’s Iray.

On the hardware side of things, the Pro Duo is largely what you expect from two Fury GPUs bolted onto a single card; some serious rendering power and a lot of memory bandwidth. Performance is a staggering 16.38 TFLOPS of raw computation; extremely useful when trying to render games at the necessary 120 FPS required for smooth VR. This effectively makes the Pro Duo the worlds fastest single-card GPU on the market (even if it is two GPUs).

AMD states the Pro Duo is 1.5 times faster than a TITAN X, and 1.3 times faster than the now aging R9 295X2 (the previous AMD dual-GPU solution). Trying to prove this will be a little tricky as samples are restricted, but going from previous review comparisons of a Fury X or Nano compared to a TITAN X, it’s quite possible (give or take a few FPS).

One thing that sticks out from the details listed, is the 3x 8-pin power requirement, even though only 2x 8-pins are needed for a 350 Watt card. AMD is likely putting in some extra headroom for overclocking, and to be honest, there should be plenty of headroom considering the cooler that’s equipped.

The Radeon Pro Duo makes use of a custom cooler by Cooler Master, and it involves two pumps in series, each placed over a GPU. The water-block also extends over the VRMs as well. Extra power, plus a large water-cooling system as standard, should mean that 10-20% overclocks should be achievable. The question remains, would you want to with $1500 on the line?

The Professionals

What sets a different tone with this card is AMD’s focus on the ‘professional’ aspect. The Pro Duo comes with the tag-line of “for gamers who create and creators who game”, and much of the press coverage centers around VR. So far, this is the only card to be classed a LiquidVR Creator Ready GPU, effectively allowing the card to work with AMD’s LiquidVR SDK and all the development options that go with it.

This professional aspect extends beyond just VR though, and there are a number of other FirePro technologies thrown into the mix. As mentioned previously, that includes FireRender, which entails a real-time viewport rendering system that uses physically-based materials – this means realistic rendering and it’s something we’ve covered before with Iray. The Pro Duo also comes with a number of application certifications as well (still waiting on details for these), and it’s these certs and licenses that bump up the cost of the GPU (which is one reason why FirePros cost more than normal GPUs).

It’s this bizarre mix of workstation features in a gaming GPU that almost encourages overclocking, that makes the Radeon Pro Duo such a hard card to describe. The price is high for a gaming card, but low for a workstation. If it can provide the 3D acceleration in Maya and 3ds, making use of FireRender for rendering, without all the licenses for SolidWorks, CATIA and the like, then honestly, $1500 for a top-tier workstation card is a bargain (a W9100 which has half the TFLOPS, but more RAM, is $3500+). Strictly as a gaming card, the Radeon Pro Duo is a hard sell, especially with Pascal and Polaris just around the corner.

When the next generation GPUs come out though, we won’t see the workstation variants of those until quite some time later (possibly next year), so this is something that has to be taken into account. There is no getting around the fact that the Pro Duo is a late release, but the extra workstation features might just give it an advantage over something like the W9100 when it comes to creating games (providing the dual 4GB memory doesn’t impede things too much).