AMD FirePro W9100 vs NVIDIA Quadro K6000

Test Setup:

We tested all four cards on an Ivy Bridge-based Core i7-4960X system configured with a Samsung 840 EVO SSD, 24GB of RAM, and Windows 8.1 Update 1 with all patches and updates installed. The W9000 GPU we tested in 2012 has actually been deprecated in favor of the W8100 (2,560  stream processors, 8GB of RAM) which puts it on a level with the Radeon R9 290 -- but with 2x the RAM that card typically carries. The W9000 still stands in as indicative of AMD's past FirePro performance, but we wanted to acknowledge the newer card.

SpecViewPerf 12:

We're going to start with SpecViewPerf 12, the latest version of the venerable SPEC benchmark. The entire test suite has been overhauled for this version, including a new extensible architecture that's designed to make SVP easier to customize and adapt for a variety of workloads. The test now includes new medical and energy datasets, updates classic viewsets, and includes a new test for the Autodesk Showcase application.

Last time around, we dinged the FirePro W9000 for poor performance in SpecViewPerf 11. The card was typically beaten by the Quadro 6000 -- a GPU based on the Fermi architecture that was already two years old. How does the GCN architecture fare in the updated version?
Overall performance between the two GPU families is better in the sense that AMD's W9000 isn't being beaten by its older rival, but SpecViewPerf 12 still favors the Quadro family overall.  Average all the tests together, and the W9100 is just 82% as fast as the K6000 -- though the price difference ($3300 vs. $5000) more than compensates for this.

Let's move on from SpecViewPerf, which is a synthetic test, and address the CAD and 3D rendering markets.