Navi Pro Graphics For Less

erek

erek

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Interesting. I do like the aesthetics personally even though...

"AMD set the new Radeon Pro W5500's MSRP at $399 and cards are readily available for that price at various on-line retailers currently. At that price, the Radeon Pro W5500 is selling for roughly half of the Radeon Pro W5700's price. It also represents a much lower introductory price than the previous generation; the Radeon Pro WX 7100 was introduced at $629. Considering the Radeon Pro W5500's better overall performance in graphics workloads, it's quieter operation, and better power consumption characteristics, we can't help but like the new Radeon Pro W5500 and the value proposition it delivers. If you're in the market for an affordable, more mainstream professional GPU, the new Navi-based Radeon Pro W5500 with RDNA is absolutely worth a look."

https://hothardware.com/reviews/amd-radeon-pro-w5500-gpu-review?page=1
 
These cards can be great performers, but if you are doing virtually anything "pro" you will need a quadro. Solidworks, Catia, Autocad, Pix4d all either perform better or only support quadro. They basically don't have an operating space where they perform which leaves them in the category of a product without a market.

That being said, AMD seems to have got on board in the linux realm, and actually supports Wayland which is still pretty new, but will eventually replace X.
 
KarsusTG said:
These cards can be great performers, but if you are doing virtually anything "pro" you will need a quadro. Solidworks, Catia, Autocad, Pix4d all either perform better or only support quadro. They basically don't have an operating space where they perform which leaves them in the category of a product without a market.

That being said, AMD seems to have got on board in the linux realm, and actually supports Wayland which is still pretty new, but will eventually replace X.
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Might want to revisit your claims, Solidworks and Autocad both support navi based solutions (and some older) with compatible and up to date drivers. This isn't 2010 anymore..

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It's good to see the workstation tax come down each generation - the difference between a $199 5500XT and a $399 Pro W5500 is small enough in the grand scheme of things that if I were building a CAD rig and also wanted to do some light gaming it's a fairly easy choice. It's certainly going to outperform the P2000 for non-CAD applications.
The P2000 thrashes it, especially in Solidworks. BUT it doesn't really matter - those benchmarks are at 4K and the models are ludicrously large, and even then the W5500 gets enough FPS to not be a hindrance 2 out of 3 models. The telescope model is kind of insane - I don't think anyone actually uses Solidworks for working on an entire building-sized assembly in practice (certainly, neither myself nor anyone I know has done so).
 
coynatha said:
And why would Solidworks.com have this page if their not supported?
https://www.solidworks.com/partner-product/radeontm-pro-wx-series-professional-graphics
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I didn't say solidworks didn't support it. I said, pro level programs either perform better (by a lot in most cases) or simply don't support radeon cards. For instance, Pix4D doesn't support radeon cards.

coynatha said:
Wut? That's not what these charts show for the W5700 vs RTX 4000.
https://techgage.com/article/amd-radeon-pro-w5700-performance-review/4/
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Your 2 min render benchmark might show a radeon and quadro neck and neck, but when you do repeated multi hour renders the difference is night and day. To put it into perspective, the WX 8200 Desktop card we have in a 7700k machine at work(not my machine, we build our own machines) cannot even keep up with the mobile max-q quadro in our new mobile workstations ( in solidworks) even with the desktop cpu and desktop cooling advantages.

Don't get me wrong. I love that AMD is turning things around and I hope they do start beating nvidia in this field (and all fields really.) I am currently using a vega64 in my personal desktop, but if I am pushing a deadline and had to make a choice, it sadly wouldn't be radeon unless I was strapped for cash and needed a bandaid. Not if my livelihood depended on it.
 
KarsusTG said:
I didn't say solidworks didn't support it. I said, pro level programs either perform better (by a lot in most cases) or simply don't support radeon cards. For instance, Pix4D doesn't support radeon cards.



Your 2 min render benchmark might show a radeon and quadro neck and neck, but when you do repeated multi hour renders the difference is night and day. To put it into perspective, the WX 8200 Desktop card we have in a 7700k machine at work(not my machine, we build our own machines) cannot even keep up with the mobile max-q quadro in our new mobile workstations ( in solidworks) even with the desktop cpu and desktop cooling advantages.

Don't get me wrong. I love that AMD is turning things around and I hope they do start beating nvidia in this field (and all fields really.) I am currently using a vega64 in my personal desktop, but if I am pushing a deadline and had to make a choice, it sadly wouldn't be radeon unless I was strapped for cash and needed a bandaid. Not if my livelihood depended on it.
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So a card that's almost two years old doesn't compete with a new one? WHO KNEW! I've read every review I could find pitting the W5700 vs the RTX 4000, and they are neck and neck, trading blows depending on software. Throw in gaming and price, and the W5700 takes a clear edge as a great combo card.

I hear what you're saying though - if I was buying one with the boss's money, I'm probably going RTX 4000. If I'm buying one for working from home (which is oddly enough, happening often these days), I'm going W5700 without hesitation. I've actually been using my 5700XT at home for a LOT of SolidWorks modeling, and besides some graphical glitches here and there, it's a rockstar. Especially against my Nvidia P620 at work, since you like comparing apples and oranges. It's SO much smoother.
 
coynatha said:
So a card that's almost two years old doesn't compete with a new one? WHO KNEW! I've read every review I could find pitting the W5700 vs the RTX 4000, and they are neck and neck, trading blows depending on software. Throw in gaming and price, and the W5700 takes a clear edge as a great combo card.

I hear what you're saying though - if I was buying one with the boss's money, I'm probably going RTX 4000. If I'm buying one for working from home (which is oddly enough, happening often these days), I'm going W5700 without hesitation. I've actually been using my 5700XT at home for a LOT of SolidWorks modeling, and besides some graphical glitches here and there, it's a rockstar. Especially against my Nvidia P620 at work, since you like comparing apples and oranges. It's SO much smoother.
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The fact that you are comparing a new 11/19 model radeon desktop card against a 11/18 desktop model quadro and they are still neck to neck (in just benchmarks) speaks volumes. In my example (because I can physically put my hands on both of these cards right now) the 10/18 Radeon 8200 desktop card (the immediate predecessor to the 5700) should easily steam roll that 2019 model max-q (read underclocked) MOBILE card and it just doesn't. It's not even close.

For most personal projects, either will be fine and as I said, the Radeon cards are great performers. But if I am fighting a deadline and it takes 12 hours to render on the radeon and 9 hours on the nvidia (and the difference is often really that big regardless of the benchmarks,) that nvidia is buying me more time to work on it and a better margin for error against the working deadline for the same money. That, more than anything is why Quadro is still the industry standard. And this is from someone with a screw Nvidia stance on most issues...

On a side note, this argument is very similar to the photoshop / graphic design argument. I cannot rationally argue that we should be using Windows computers for our graphic design teams because they CAN run that software and are cheaper to build / maintain when the software is CLEARLY optimized for the mac environment and we will be slowly bleeding man hours / production time to this hardware problem. It's just the same problem in a different format.
 
KarsusTG said:
The fact that you are comparing a new 11/19 model radeon desktop card against a 11/18 desktop model quadro and they are still neck to neck (in just benchmarks) speaks volumes. In my example (because I can physically put my hands on both of these cards right now) the 10/18 Radeon 8200 desktop card (the immediate predecessor to the 5700) should easily steam roll that 2019 model max-q (read underclocked) MOBILE card and it just doesn't. It's not even close.

For most personal projects, either will be fine and as I said, the Radeon cards are great performers. But if I am fighting a deadline and it takes 12 hours to render on the radeon and 9 hours on the nvidia (and the difference is often really that big regardless of the benchmarks,) that nvidia is buying me more time to work on it and a better margin for error against the working deadline for the same money. That, more than anything is why Quadro is still the industry standard. And this is from someone with a screw Nvidia stance on most issues...

On a side note, this argument is very similar to the photoshop / graphic design argument. I cannot rationally argue that we should be using Windows computers for our graphic design teams because they CAN run that software and are cheaper to build / maintain when the software is CLEARLY optimized for the mac environment and we will be slowly bleeding man hours / production time to this hardware problem. It's just the same problem in a different format.
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We're not buying in 11/2018. We're buying now. Nobody in their right mind would by a WX8200 today, unless they got a great deal on it. That's why I didn't like your comparison.
 
KarsusTG said:
On a side note, this argument is very similar to the photoshop / graphic design argument. I cannot rationally argue that we should be using Windows computers for our graphic design teams because they CAN run that software and are cheaper to build / maintain when the software is CLEARLY optimized for the mac environment and we will be slowly bleeding man hours / production time to this hardware problem. It's just the same problem in a different format.
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Again. Wut?

Overall, if Photoshop is your primary concern, you can get about 10% higher performance from one of our $4,200 Puget Systems workstations with either an AMD Ryzen 3900X or Intel Core i9 9900K compared to the $19,599 Mac Pro (2019) we tested.

Compared to the $20k Mac Pro we tested, a $4k PC using an Intel Core i9 9900K and NVIDIA GeForce 2080 Ti ended up being about 5% faster overall, while a $5.5k PC using an AMD Threadripper 3960X is about 18% faster. Even compared to the much better priced iMac Pro, a PC that costs $1K less is going to be about 35% faster.

But in this case, the Mac Pro is so underwhelming that it is hard to not simply say "Don't buy a Mac Pro for Premiere Pro".

Why buy 3 Mac Pro's, you could instead buy 4 fully loaded PC's and another employee!?
 
coynatha said:
Again. Wut?

Overall, if Photoshop is your primary concern, you can get about 10% higher performance from one of our $4,200 Puget Systems workstations with either an AMD Ryzen 3900X or Intel Core i9 9900K compared to the $19,599 Mac Pro (2019) we tested.

Compared to the $20k Mac Pro we tested, a $4k PC using an Intel Core i9 9900K and NVIDIA GeForce 2080 Ti ended up being about 5% faster overall, while a $5.5k PC using an AMD Threadripper 3960X is about 18% faster. Even compared to the much better priced iMac Pro, a PC that costs $1K less is going to be about 35% faster.

But in this case, the Mac Pro is so underwhelming that it is hard to not simply say "Don't buy a Mac Pro for Premiere Pro".

Why buy 3 Mac Pro's, you could instead buy 4 fully loaded PC's and another employee!?
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If your use case is 100% Adobe products, I don't disagree with you.
Adobe products in general aren't coded particularly well, and aren't multi-threaded pretty much at all. So it's still completely dependent on single-thread IPC/Clockspeed where an Intel 9900K is going to fair much better than an 28-core 2.5Ghz processor (and this is regardless of if you're in Windows or macOS. So you could argue against 28-Core 2.5GHz Xeon Workstations running Windows if your use case is Adobe Products).
If you're serious about video editing however, then you're likely not in Premiere. Resolve as an example will make use of all your cores and it's frankly multitudes faster than Premiere across basically any system, regardless of if you're on Mac or PC. It also more properly utilizes GPU's and isn't stuck to Adobe's poor Mercury Playback Engine.
Resolve also has the industries best Color-Grading tools and the equivalent of After-Effects built into it meaning it doesn't require round-trips like Premiere/After-Effects does.
FCPX is also the fastest NLE in terms of editing (besting Resolve's already massive lead by around 5-10%). Another viable option if you're serious about editing quickly.

The Mac Pro also has access to the Afterburner card.
To quote Apple directly: "Supports system playback of up to 6 streams of 8K ProRes RAW or up to 23 streams of 4K ProRes RAW"
Yeah, no $5000 PC is going to be able to handle that. A 9900k with a 2080Ti would get absolutely crushed by that workload.

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On topic, I'm excited that there are pro cards that are $400 now. Anything that gives me more options and power for less is welcomed. It would be interesting to see if 2 of these in mGPU would be worth considering over a single W5700.

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EDIT: Spelling, grammar, not content.
 
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