Legit Reviews

AMD Firepro W8000 and W9000 Professional Graphics Reviewed

AMD recently launched its latest line of workstation graphics, leading with the AMD FirePro W9000 Graphics Processing Unit. AMD designed these cards to balance compute and 3D workloads efficiently for computer-aided design and engineering, and for media and entertainment (M&E) professionals. WE take a look at the AMD FirePro W9000 and W8000 to see how they perform on a few popular professional benchmarks.

AMD has successfully brought the new GCN architecture to the workstation! We noticed some pretty nice performance gains in the FirePro W8000 and W9000 cards from the previous generation of AMD FirePro graphics cards. The AMD FirePro W9000 is impressive on paper as it has 2048 stream processors running at 975MHz, 6GB of ECC GDDR5 memory at 1375MHz and the ability to drive six monitors! In some benchmarks the AMD FirePro W9000 blew away the previous generation FirePro V8800 video card, but in others it was...

Article Title: AMD Firepro W8000 and W9000 Professional Graphics Reviewed
Article URL: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/2004/1/

Can anyone explain to me what makes these cards worth 7x more than their gaming top of the line counterpart?! Are these people nuts?! Who would spend so much money on a card, that takes about $20 to produce?!

sbohdan wrote:Can anyone explain to me what makes these cards worth 7x more than their gaming top of the line counterpart?! Are these people nuts?! Who would spend so much money on a card, that takes about $20 to produce?!

Well, remember these cards are running AutoCAD 2013 ($4500) and Maya 2013 ($4100). You are talking about high-end software for big name projects. Someone buying a W9000 is a studio or corporation that is building something massive that is worth millions or billions of dollars. Think of Boeing and the systems they used to design the dreamliner. These aren't the cards you buy to design a plastic cup mold! LOL These are not consumer cards or something you'd see in a home PC.

You are paying for the ISV vertifications that the cards work with the applications you need. Here are the ISV certifications for the new AMD FirePro cards:
As you know, the W9000 uses the full Tahiti core, which is pretty big. It costs well over $20 to make just that piece of silicon.

And they are not built the same as desktop cards for games. The before 2009 way things are rendered in programs like Inventor are completely different, it was all OpenGL not DirectX like now.

There is software that still requires a good OpenGL card, like Mudbox and Maya, thats where the FireGL and Quatro cards come in and spank desktop cards. They can render stuff on the fly so much better, and smoother. Makes life SOOOO much easier.

6 displays on 1 card = awesome. I can't afford 3 new displays but if your company is shelling out for one of these then 6 new monitors is a drop in the bucket.