AMD Radeon Pro W5700 Review: Affordable Navi For Workstations

Name: AMD Radeon Pro W5700
Brand: AMD

by Marco Chiappetta — Tuesday, November 19, 2019, 09:30 AM EDT

AMD Radeon Pro W5700 - Cryptography, Image Processing, and LuxMark

Page 2: AMD Radeon Pro W5700 - Cryptography, Image Processing, and LuxMark

How We Configured Our Test Systems: We tested the professional graphics cards in this article on an Intel X299-based motherboard powered by an Intel Core i9-9980XE 18-core processor and 32B of Corsair DDR4 RAM. The first thing we did when configuring the test system was enter the UEFI and set all values to their "high performance" or "optimal" default settings and disabled any integrated peripherals that wouldn't be put to use. The memory's X.M.P. profile was enabled to ensure optimal memory performance (but CPU core enhancement was disabled), the solid state drive was formatted, and Windows 10 Professional x64 was installed. When the installation was complete, we fully updated the OS and installed all of the drivers, applications, and benchmark tools necessary to complete our tests.

HotHardware's Test System

Intel Core i9 Powered

Hardware Used:
Intel Core i9-9980XE
(3GHz - 4.4GHz, 18-Core)
Gigabyte Aorus X299 Gaming 7 Pro
(Intel X299 Chipset)

NVIDIA Quadro RTX 4000
AMD Radeon Pro WX 8200
AMD Radeon Pro W5700

32GB Corsair DDR4-2666
Samsung SSD 960 Pro
Integrated Audio
Integrated Network

Relevant Software:
Windows 10 Pro x64
AMD Radeon Pro v19.Q4
NVIDIA Quadro Drivers v441.12

Benchmarks Used:
SPECviewperf 13
LuxMark v3.1
Blender v2.80
SiSoft SANDRA 2018 SP2
VRMark
Unigine Superposition
IndigoBench

SiSoft SANDRA 2020

Cryptography And Image Processing OpenCL Performance Tests

SANDRA's GPGPU Image Processing benchmark runs through an array of filters on its reference data and offers up an aggregate score, derived from a number of individual results. Its GPGPU Cryptography benchmark churns through an assortment of workloads, and presents individual results for overall bandwidth, AES256 encryption and decryption, and SHA2-256 hashing bandwidth. CUDA and OpenCL code paths are available in these tests, but we used OpenCL on all cards. Previously, using the CUDA path with NVIDIA GPUs resulted in better performance, but OpenCL actually outperforms CUDA in these tests now.

The Quadro RTX 4000 finishes well out in front of the Radeon Pro W5700 in the SANDRA Image Processing test, but the Vega-based Radeon Pro WX 8200 takes a strong lead overall here, offering nearly double the performance of the W5700.

The Radeon Pro W5700 outpaces the Quadro RTX 4000 in two of the three cryptography tests, but once again nothing touches the Vega-based Radeon Pro WX 8200 with its ultra-wide 2048-bit HBM2 memory interface and strong compute chops.

LuxMark v3.1

OpenCL Benchmark

LuxMark is a cross-platform, OpenCL-accelerated 3D rendering benchmark. It's a tool based on the open source LuxRender physically-based spectral rendering engine, which accurately models the transportation of light and supports high dynamic range. LuxRender features a number of material types to allow rendering of photo-realistic and artistic scenes. LuxRender is free software, licensed under the GPL, that offers plugins for packages like Blender, Maya, Cinema 4D and 3DS Max.

The Quadro RTX 4000 leads the pack in all three of LuxMark's tests, though the Radeon Pro W5700 isn't far behind in the LuxBall and Neuman TLM tests. The Radeon Pro W5700 also outruns the Radeon Pro WX 8200 in the LuxBall and Neuman TLM tests, but when the 8200's higher memory bandwidth and additional compute performance comes into play (i.e. in the taxing Hotel Lobby test), the WX 8200 pulls ahead.