Radeon has released four new graphics cards aimed at professionals in conjunction with the ongoing Siggraph 2016 event. All four graphics cards was introduced under a new professional graphics branding called “Radeon Pro” which replaces the dated FirePro brand.
Radeon Pro WX Series
The first three graphics cards introduced by Radeon during its event were those under the Radeon Pro WX Series. These are the Radeon Pro WX 4100, WX 5100, and WX 7100.
The smallest of them all, Radeon Pro WX 4100, is based on the Polaris 11 GPU. It comes with a stream processor count of 1,024 and VRAM capacity of 4GB. Memory bandwidth for this graphics card clocks in at 112GBps and it will have a TDP of less than 75W. Because of its size, the Radeon Pro WX 4100 is fitted with four mini DisplayPort ports instead of the regular, full-sized port. Also not forgetting the FP32 (single-precision floating point) performance of more than 2 TFLOPs.
Following that are the significantly more powerful Radeon Pro WX 5100 and WX 7100 graphics cards – both of which are equipped with the Polaris 10 GPU. The Radeon Pro WX 5100 and WX 7100 have a stream processor count of 1,792 and 2,058 respectively. In addition, both graphics cards also come with an FP32 performance of 4 TFLOPs and 5 TFLOPs each. Besides that, the TDP of both the graphics cards are rated at 75W and 150W respectively.
Price wasn’t announced, but sources are saying that all three Radeon Pro WX graphics cards should be priced below US$1,000 (around RM4,070).
Radeon Pro SSG
Radeon’s next graphics card is a data set crunching beast. Dubbed as the Radeon Pro SSG, Radeon’s most powerful graphics card under the Radeon Pro Series comes with a rather unique, never-before-seen feature: it uses M.2 flash memory. Why flash memory? Because it has the ability to access data way quicker compared to other GPU memory standards (we’re talking about Terabytes of data).
When pitted against a dated high-end FirePro graphics card, the performance output of the Radeon Pro SSG becomes quite apparent. Radeon proved this by running two separate outputs of an 8K video on two PCs: one with a Radeon Pro SSG and another with a high-end FirePro graphics card. The latter graphics card was able to output the 8K video at 17fps, while the Radeon Pro SSG was able to do the same at 96fps – a huge improvement over the older card.
Again, like the Radeon Pro WX graphic cards, the Radeon Pro SSG’s price was not announced. However, allow us to remind our readers that these graphics cards – especially the Radeon Pro SSG – are made for professional use only; which means that they aren’t meant to be used to run Crysis 3 at 100fps. Knowing this, it wouldn’t be shocking then, to know that the estimated retail price for the Radeon Pro SSG Development Kit is US$9,999 (about RM40,710).
