AMD Releases 19.Q2 Radeon Pro Enterprise Driver, Improves CAD & Remote Desktop Performance

AMD has today released the latest iteration of its Radeon Pro Enterprise driver, version 19.Q2. It might be a bit late in the current quarter to release a driver named after that quarter, but 19.Q2 comes just under three months after the release of 19.Q1. In this one, AMD is throwing some big performance claims around, naming NVIDIA’s Quadro series as its target.

In particular, this driver is said to increase the performance of CAD applications like SolidWorks, with the Radeon Pro WX 4100 allegedly outperforming the Quadro P1000, and the Radeon Pro WX 7100 beating out the Quadro RTX 4000.

Such claims come at a ridiculous time, as we just wrapped-up 49 graphs worth of fresh workstation GPU results last night. That said, we’ll quickly test this latest driver before getting down to writing to see if AMD’s claims carry over to our testing. At our last check, the RTX 4000 beats out the WX 8200, so to hear that WX 7100 should now outperform it is notable.

Since the last major Enterprise driver release, AMD has vastly improved its ISV certification list. 19.Q1 was said to bring 290 of them to the table, whereas the company is now quoting 750. It’s important to note that each of these certifications is for a specific version of that application, so just one of those, such as 3ds Max, may be responsible for several of the certifications. The current release notes don’t offer an ISV certification list, but the last one did.

AMD has been pushing remote GPU access for a little while now, and has ramped up its promotion with this driver, noting that using AMD Remote Workstation can allow you to get work done with “virtually” no performance degradation, with the company using SPECviewperf 13’s 3ds Max performance as one of its gauges.

Something nice that this driver has going for it is support for the May Windows 10 update, which you may note isn’t even available yet. It’s set to become available in a couple of weeks, so it’s great to see RPro ready for the next Microsoft upgrade battle.

You can grab the latest driver right here.