AMD Radeon Pro W6400 Review: Low Power RDNA 2 For Budget Workstations
Next up we have some numbers from SPECviewperf 2020, the latest version of the venerable SPEC benchmark as of this article's publication. The entire test suite has been overhauled for this version, and it includes a new extensible architecture that's designed to make SVP easier to customize and adapt for a variety of workloads. The test also includes new medical and energy datasets, updated classic viewsets, and includes a test for Autodesk Showcase.
SPECviewperf 2020 OpenGL / DX Benchmarks
SPECviewperf includes a variety of tests, which produce significantly different framerates, so we've sorted them into three groups to make the results a bit easier to sort through. Please note the legends at the bottom of each chart, which designate the application or viewset used...
The Radeon Pro W6400 scores a couple of victories over the older Radeon Pro WX 5100 in a few of SPECviewperf 2020's individual tests, but with only 4GB of memory and a 64-bit memory interface, it can't hang with the higher-end cards. Also note that the W6400 fails to complete the creo-03 test, hence the lack of results in the chart.
VR & Ray Tracing Benchmarks
UL 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. We followed up UL's VRMark with the DirectX Ray Tracing (DXR) Feature test recently added to the 3DMark suite...
The Radeon Pro W6400 performed squarely in between the Polaris-based Radeon Pro WX 5100 and the previous-gen Navi-based W5500 in VRMark. And again, the higher-end -- much higher-priced -- cards offer significantly higher performance.
Only three of the professional GPUs we tested feature hardware accelerated ray tracing, and the software support necessary to run this test, so the Radeon Pro W5500 and WX 5100 have been omitted from this chart. As you can see, the Radeon Pro W6400 trails the other cards, as expected. As we saw in our Radeon RX 6500 XT review, 4GB of memory is simply not enough to handle ray tracing effects in virtually all of today's applications. The support is there in a pinch, but don't expect smooth framerates.
Blackmagic RAW Speed Test Results
The Blackmagic RAW Speed Test is a CPU and GPU benchmarking tool that tests the speed of decoding full-resolution Blackmagic RAW frames. The tool can be used to evaluate the performance at various resolutions and bitrates on the CPU or using OpenCL on a GPU. We're reporting two results here, both at an 8K resolution, but at differing bitrates and compression levels.
The Blackmagic RAW speed test reveals what may very well be a deal breaker for many users that might consider a pro-vis graphics card of this type. Because the Radeon Pro W6400 lacks any video encode acceleration, it trails all of the other cards by a wide margin in this test.
