How The Radeon Professional Graphics Performance Changed Over 13 Years

[phoronix]

Phoronix: How The Radeon Professional Graphics Performance Changed Over 13 Years

AMD last week launched the Radeon PRO W7500 and Radeon PRO W7600 professional graphics cards built on RDNA3. Due to AMD's unique position with their open-source Linux graphics driver stack, I decided to see how these new Radeon professional GPUs compare to FirePro hardware from 13 years ago for the raw performance and power efficiency.

https://www.phoronix.com/review/radeon-pro-13

[gnattu]

The date of these cards are bit "uneven". We have a bunch of ancient cards and we have two latest cards, but missing a lot in the middle which is also a couple of years of progress. Could have more recent gens like W6600 and WX 7100 in this single slot comparison and would make the comparison more interesting.

[Michael]

The date of these cards are bit "uneven". We have a bunch of ancient cards and we have two latest cards, but missing a lot in the middle which is also a couple of years of progress. Could have more recent gens like W6600 and WX 7100 in this single slot comparison and would make the comparison more interesting.

As written in the article, the testing was limited by the Radeon PRO graphics card i had available.

[skeevy420]

Michael

I like that first picture. It reminds me of when a magician says "Pick a card, any card".

Your Linux experience mirrors mine with consumer AMD hardware where I just swap GPUs and everything keeps on working. Same setups on Windows involve multiple reboots after swapping the card whereas Linux requires the one reboot to swap hardware.

Performance aside, those older ATi GPUs sure do look a lot sexier than the modern AMDs.

[smitty3268]

It'd be interesting to see this modern r600g performance versus the original proprietary drivers that got shipped for those old cards, if it's even possible to get that running anymore.

Looks like Gert is going to drop the old sb optimizer soon: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/...requests/24509

[hkupty]

It would be very interesting, if possible, to see how much newer mesa/kernel brings up the performance of those cards compared to when they were just released. I know it'd be very impractical to set up a very old setup which probably won't run the benchmarks correctly, but still, one can dream

[schmidtbag]

A few years ago I got a used V7900 for $35. It kept up in some BOINC tests for a long while. IIRC, it came close to I think a 1070 in some workloads (probably something like milkyway@home if I remember right). I had to use fglrx though, since there were no Mesa CL drivers for r600 at the time.
Considering that GPU is 12 years old (13 years for the architecture) and didn't get much open-source attention, I'd say having 10% the performance of a W7600 is really not that bad. I'm sure with more VRAM and a little more driver optimization and you could narrow that to maybe 15%.

[boboviz]

A few years ago I got a used V7900 for $35. It kept up in some BOINC tests for a long while. IIRC, it came close to I think a 1070 in some workloads (probably something like milkyway@home if I remember right). I had to use fglrx though, since there were no Mesa CL drivers for r600 at the time.

I'm curious to see the gpu on Folding@Home...

[rmfx]

AMD really does greater and greater products!

If they were selling their card at half the price of Nvidia who’s selling at 4x the honest price, AMD gpu would be super popular and they would make big money..
But for whatever reason, they aligned their prices on NVs while their brand and software ecosystem is much much much weaker.
Result: their marketshare is a joke.

Sad strategy.

[dragorth]

I have no idea why nobody sees why the prices are so high. You have some factors that are playing with the market that have nothing to do with gaming/productivity.

AMD and NVidia both had to order parts based on what they though demand was going to be, and these parts where being ordered during the shutdown periods and directly after, where the fabs are still a bit backlogged from that time. In order to procure silicon time, their prices were surely higher, because the time of the fabs was much more limited.

At the same time, advancements in AI have produced a similar spike in demand for the higher end cards. These are sold at much higher prices, so both companies are prioritizing them rather than their normal practice of gimping cores so that they have a broad consumer lineup. This is an obvious play from both of them, and it means there are fewer consumer cards to actually sell, so the demand outweighs the supply, raising the prices.

To some extent, the great demand from the shutdown is still being starved as well, so the demand pressure is higher.

All this to say, these companies are profit centered, as they should be. And they are have to make a profit.