AMD FirePro W5000 Professional Graphics Card Review

SPECviewperf 11 64-bit

The first test in are benchmark suite is the SPECgpc project group’s SPECviewperf 11 which was released in June 2010. It is an industry standard tool used by a great deal of companies to test the performance of professional graphics cards. SPECviewperf 11 tests various viewsets that are taken from todays most used professional applications. Using large models and advanced OpenGL functions, it really stresses the professional series GPUs in many ways. The benchmark is run at its default settings with a resolution of 1920×1080.

SPECviewperf 11 Viewsets:

• CATIA (catia-03)
• EnSight (ensigh-04)
• LightWave (light01)
• Maya (maya-03)
• Pro/ENGINEER (proe-05)
• SolidWorks (sw-02)
• Siemens Teamcenter Visualization Mockup (tcvis-02)
• Siemens NX (snx-01)

A quick look at the chart tells us that while the Radeon HD 7970 might be a high end desktop GPU with the superior specs, it just can’t get the job done compared to the FirePro W5000; which, due to drivers, ECC memory, and further tweaks all tailored towards this kind of software, allows it to simply walk away in these benchmarks.

In a more visually appealing comparison, we can see that the Radeon HD 7970 (in red) in almost all benchmarks except one gets slaughtered. In the Maya test, we see the FirePro W5000 really show a massive advantage to the tune of 315%. Overall, the FirePro W500 loses only one test by 18% the rest of the tests have it winning by 100-315%. It goes to show just how much drivers and optimizations matter when it comes to professional applications.