AMD Radeon Pro W5700 Review: Affordable Navi For Workstations

Futuremark’s VRMark is designed to test a PC’s readiness for the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift virtual reality headsets. The benchmark does not, however, require that one of the headsets is attached to the PC to run and it uses an in-house graphics engine and content to ensure comparable results between different platforms. We ran the "Blue Room" VRMark test at defaults settings here, which is currently the most taxing test offered by the tool.

VR And Gaming Graphics Benchmarks Testing VR And Game Readiness

The Quadro RTX 4000 clearly outpaces the Radeons here, but the Radeon Pro W5700 jumps out in front of the Radeon Pro WX 8200, by nearly 20%.

Superposition is powered by the UNIGINE 2 Engine. It offers an array of benchmark modes, targeting gaming workloads as well as VR, with both DirectX and OpenGL code paths. Unigine Superposition uses the developer’s unique SSRTGI (Screen-Space Ray-Traced Global Illumination) dynamic lighting technology, along with high quality textures and models, to produce some stunning visuals. We ran Superposition in its "VR Future" benchmark mode to compare the performance of all of the graphics cards featured here... 

Superposition's VR benchmark tells the same story as VRMark. The Quadro RTX 4000 outruns both of the Radeons, but the Radeon Pro W5700 leads the previous-gen Radeon Pro WX 8200 by a wide margin.

None of these GPUs featured here are meant for gaming PCs, but developers will often need to assess performance of their projects (or just blow off some steam) so we ran 3DMark's DX12 "Time Spy" benchmark on them to see how they'd behave in a game-like scenario. Here, the new Radeon Pro W5700 finishes well out in front, outpacing both the Quadro RTX 4000 and Radeon Pro WX 8200 across the board.

Total System Power Consumption Tested at the Outlet

Before bringing this article to a close, we'd like to cover a couple of final data points -- namely, power consumption and noise. Throughout all of our benchmarking and testing, we monitored acoustics and tracked how much power our test system was consuming using a power meter. Our goal was to give you an idea of how much power each graphics configuration used while idling and also while under a heavy workload. Please keep in mind that we were testing total system power consumption at the outlet here, not the power being drawn by the graphics cards alone.

Idle power is similar with all three of the cards we tested, but load power is quite different. The Vega-based Radeon Pro WX 8200 consumes significantly more power under load than the Quadro RTX 4000 and Radeon Pro W5700. The Quadro also uses less power than the Radeon Pro W5700, with about 45-65 watts separating the two cards, depending on the workload. The W5700 is clearly more power-efficient than the WX 8200, but NVIDIA's Turing-based GPU powering the RTX 4000 has an obvious edge in that regard.

About Radeon Pro W5700 Acoustics

The Radeon Pro W5700's low power consumption relative to its predecessor results in a quieter, cooling running card, however. In most scenarios, the Radeon Pro W5700's cooler will spin up to audible levels, but never to a point we would consider the card loud. The blower-style cooler design used on the W5700 isn't known for its silence, but in real-world use cases it should be quiet enough for any environment.