![]() It looks to be a great companion product for SolidWorks, as it can also be used for ray trace rendering in the free Radeon ProRender for SolidWorks plug-in. At £758 + VAT, the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition offers a whole lot of power for the price. In short, GPU rendering performance is dependent on the software, as it is with 3D. However, as Nvidia puts more resources into making its GPUs run fast on CUDA, and Radeon ProRender is developed by AMD, one would expect AMD to have an advantage. ![]() Radeon ProRender only uses OpenCL, so the GPUs are on a level playing field as far as the API is concerned. However, as more development work has been done on the CUDA engine than on the “experimental OpenCL mode” Nvidia GPUs are always likely to do better here. It’s important to note here that V-Ray works in two modes: with CUDA (an Nvidia optimised technology) and OpenCL (an open standard championed by AMD). We also tested for GPU rendering in V-Ray, (in which Nvidia had a clear lead) and in Radeon ProRender (where both Vega GPUs edged out the Quadro P5000). Both GPUs also performed well in VR in a number of pro VR applications using an Oculus Rift. Looking at the results from the VRMark cyan room test, AMD appears to have an advantage over Nvidia in applications that use the DirectX 12 graphics API, that should appear in game engine viz tools soon. In more demanding 3D applications, the performance of both Vega cards was good, generally sitting between the Quadro P4000 and P5000, depending on application, although in Autodesk LIVE and Autodesk VRED with antialiasing enabled they were a touch slower than the P4000. This would not be the case with a consumer Radeon GPU. SolidWorks recognised the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition as a professional GPU and therefore allowed us to turn on RealView. In our SolidWorks 2015 and PTC Creo 3.0 benchmarks all five cards delivered very similar high scores, indicating they will offer more than enough performance for 3D CAD. For comparison we also tested the single slot ‘Polaris’ Radeon Pro WX 7100 and the ‘Pascal’ Nvidia Quadro P4000 and P5000 with the 385.90 driver. We tested both cards inside a 4.2GHz overclocked Intel Core i5-4690K workstation running Windows 10 using AMD’s 17.Q4 driver for the WX 9100 and a 17.Q4.1 driver for the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition. Those thinking of upgrading to Vega will need to make sure their workstation power supply has enough grunt and the motherboard/chassis can accommodate a full length, double height graphics card. It also means it draws more power - up to 300W, compared to 230W on the Radeon Pro WX 9100. However, the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition GPU is clocked higher, which results in better performance. In terms of core specs, both cards are virtually identical - 4,096 Stream processors and 16GB of superfast HBM2 memory. As a result, the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition will not be available in workstations from major OEMs, only specialist manufacturers. It also only comes with a one year warranty, whereas the WX 9100 offers three. ![]() It might use virtually the same pro driver as the Radeon Pro WX 9100 (so will benefit from the pro 3D application optimisations), but it will not have the ISV certifications.
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