AMD Firepro W8000 and W9000 Professional Graphics Cards Reviewed

SPECviewperf 11 64-bit

The SPECgpc project group’s SPECviewperf 11 — released in late June 2010 — is the standard tool used by many for professional graphics cards. SPECviewperf 11 featuresa a new GUI, fully updated viewsets traced from newer versions of applications, larger models, and advanced OpenGL functionality such as shading and vertex buffer objects (VBOs). We ran this benchmark at the default settings of 1920×1080.

SPECviewperf 11 Viewset Descriptions:

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

Rather than making eight charts for you to look at we put the data results in one table, so you can see it all at once. As you can see the performance difference between the AMD FirePro V8800 and W8000 is fairly significant. The benchmarks that stand out the most are EnSight and Siemens NX as the scores nearly doubled in each of those programs. The smallest gains were seen in Pro/ENGINEER, but nice performance gains were shown in Maya and SolidWorks.

The difference between the W9000 and the W8000 were on average just 1-2 frames per second with the high being 4.45FPS in EnSight. With just an 8.6% performance difference between the cards and a huge price gap it is clear the AMD Firepro W8000 offers a better price versus performance value, but the AMD FirePro W9000 is about having the best performance possible. As with any flagship product you buy it because you want to have the fastest and price isn’t an issue.