AMD Radeon Pro W7900 And W7800 Review: Potent Pro-Vis Graphics Punch

How We Configured Our Test Systems: We tested the professional graphics cards represented in this article on a MSI Z790 Carbon motherboard, equipped with a Core i9-13900KS processor and 32GB of G.SKILL DDR5 RAM clocked at 5,800MT/s. The first thing we did when configuring the test system was enter the UEFI and set all values to their "high performance" defaults, then we disabled any integrated peripherals that wouldn't be put to use, and enabled Resizable BAR support. The memory's clock was dialed in to its optimal performance settings using its XMP profile and the solid state drive was then formatted and Windows 11 Professional was installed and fully updated. When the Windows installation was complete, we installed all of the drivers, applications and benchmark tools necessary to complete our tests.

Out Test System Configuration:

Hardware Used: Intel Core i9-13900KS (5.4GHz - 6GHz, 24-Core) MSI Z790 Carbond (Intel Z790 Chipset) 32GB G.SKILL DDR5-5800 Samsung SSD 990 Integrated Audio Integrated Network NVIDIARTX A6000 (Ampere Generation) AMD Radeon Pro W6800 AMD Radeon Pro W7900 AMD Radeon Pro W7800

Relevant Software: Windows 11 Pro AMD Radeon Pro v23.Q2 NVIDIA Quadro Drivers v536.67 Benchmarks Used: SPECviewperf 2020 v3.1 LuxMark v4 Blender v3.6 SiSoft SANDRA 2021 VRMark Blackmagic RAW Speed Test IndigoBench 3DMark DXR Feature Test

SiSoft SANDRA 20201 GPU Benchmarks

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 multitude 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 the latest versions of this test.


With its massive memory bandwidth and fully-fat GPU, the Radeon Pro W7900 dominated all of the other cards we tested across the board in the various image processing tests. The W7800 also performed well, besting the NVIDIA RTX A6000 (Ampere generation) in every test and falling just behing the W6800 in only one. 

LuxMark v4.0 Benchmarks

IndigoBench Rendering Benchmarks

The Radeon Pro W7900 scores a vicotry with the Bedroom model in IndigoBench, but can't catch the RTX A6000 wth the supercar model. And the Radeon Pro W7800 ends up trailing all of the cards, including the previous-gen W6800. We were somewhat surprised by this result for the W7800, but it was repeatable nonetheless.

Blender v3.6 Rendering Benchmarks

Blender is a free and open source 3D creation suite that can handle everything from modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, even video editing and game creation. It has a built-in benchmarking tool that will track the time it takes to complete rendering a particular model. We used the GPU-focused monster, junkshop, and classroom models for these tests...

The latest editions of Blender and the Blender benchmark can make use of NVIDIA's OptiX backend to leverage the GPU's RT cores and AMD's HIP to use the Navi 31 GPU's ray accelerators. As such, the AMD cards show big gains versus older versions of the software, but it's still not enough to overtake the RTX A6000.