AMD Radeon Pro W6800 Professional Graphics Card Review

1. Introduction2. AMD Radeon Pro W6800 Specifications3. Testing Methodology4. SPECviewperf 20205. SPECviewperf 2020 and Blender Render6. OpenCL7. Power and Temperature8. Closing Thoughts9. View All Pages

The AMD Radeon Pro W6800 is unfortunately not the professional accelerator to revive AMD's fortunes in this market. It is an unquestionably quick card compared to previous generations, and the 32GB of frame buffer will be a real boon for some texture sets and workloads. The NVIDIA Quadro RTX A5000 only offers 24GB, and if you want more you will need the much more expensive A6000.

But otherwise, the W6800 lags behind all of NVIDIA's Ampere Quadro RTX generation in performance, even the cheaper A4000, except in a couple of applications (most notably 3ds Max). Unless you can really make use of that 32GB of GDDR6, the A5000 is the faster choice, and for most activities even the A4000 will outperform the W6800. The A4000 only has 16GB of frame buffer, half as much as the W6800, but for many 3D content creation activities this will be more than enough.

There are other considerations than just raw performance. The W6800 is frugal on power and runs cool. It also sports six monitor outputs, enabling really huge multi-screen arrays. It is also quite capable even when your system is doing something strenuous in the background like rendering, although NVIDIA's latest cards are similarly good.

Overall, though, we had expected more from the AMD Radeon W6800. It's competitive with the original NVIDIA Quadro RTX generation, but NVIDIA has moved on a lot with Ampere, raising the bar out of reach again.

While AMD is wiping the floor with Intel in the professional CPU space, yet again it appears to be a generation behind NVIDIA in graphics acceleration performance.

The AMD Radeon Pro W6800 is available from B&H Photo in the USA for $2,499.

Pros:

• Huge 32GB memory.
• Frugal on power consumption.
• Runs cool under load.
• Extensive multi-monitor options with six Mini-DisplayPort outputs.
• Support for two 8K 60Hz monitors.

Cons:

• Roundly beaten by NVIDIA's Ampere Quadro RTX cards in most professional applications.
• Only slightly more OpenCL power than the cheaper NVIDIA Quadro RTX A4000.

KitGuru says: The AMD Radeon Pro W6800 moves the bar up considerably over previous AMD professional cards, but NVIDIA's Ampere generation Quadro RTX range has moved the bar to a completely different stadium.

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