AMD FirePro W5000 Professional Graphics Card Review

SPECapc Maya 2012

It was just a short while ago that the SPECapc Autodesk Maya 2012 benchmark was released and today we will be using it to give a more in depth look into the performance users can expect with the FirePro W5000 when using this particular software package. There are 50 individual tests in this benchmark which cover a wide range of scenarios such as modeling, rendering, deformation, animation etc. Some of the features included in the SPECapc Maya 2012 benchmark include:

• Additional tests that measure CPU-intensive tasks beyond rendering, including physics-based simulations such as liquid, smoke, cloth, hair and deformation.
• Performance tests for three types of rendering mental ray, Maya Software and Maya Hardware 2.0.
• Composite scores that are weighted to better reflect performance of shading and texturing features most used by Maya customers.
• Upgrades associated with the migration from Maya 2009 to Maya 2012.

We installed Autodesk Maya 2012 and ran the SPECapc Maya 2012 benchmark to see how the FirePro W5000 compares to the Radeon HD 7970.

The trend continues with the little powerhouse that can, the FirePro W5000 slaughtering the Radeon HD 7970. This time the difference, while not as pronounced as it was in the SPECviewperf 11 results, is still staggering; with the FirePro W5000 being 97% faster than the Radeon HD 7970. With these results, it’s easy to see that when using Autodesk Maya a FirePro series GPU really pays dividends.