AMD FirePro W9100 vs NVIDIA Quadro K6000

PTC Creo is another 3D CAD application used for parametric modeling, product development and design. AMD prominently talked up PTC Creo 2.0 when it launched the W9000 two years ago. Here, oddly, we see evidence of a prominent Nvidia performance gain -- and a significant performance hit for AMD.

PTC Creo shows AMD and Nvidia trading blows -- the W9100 and K6000 tie in the Graphics Composite test, and each win one of the other tests -- the Quadro 6000 is faster in wireframe composites, while the FirePro W9100 is faster in the shader composite tests. The FirePro W9000 is also faster than the older Quadro 6000 -- about what we'd expect from the two cards.

That's the end of our 3D rendering and CAD/CAM tests -- let's turn to multimedia encoding and 3D acceleration in Adobe products instead. AMD scored a major coup by winning Apple's Mac Pro and Adobe has patched some of its Creative Cloud applications in recent months to reflect that -- we tested Adobe Premiere Pro, Photoshop, and Sony's Vegas Pro 13. We intended to also include results from Adobe After Effects, but that application doesn't support OpenCL yet -- not even with its latest updates.

Sony Vegas Pro 13:

Sony's Vegas Pro is the company's software package for non-linear editing (NLE). We tested it using a project that Sony initially distributed for benchmark and testing purposes back in 2011. We encoded that project in three different formats, all of which were capable of using the GPU -- a MainConcept AVC codec, XDCAM-EX, and a Sony XAVC codec. All three formats were encoded in 1080p at default detail levels and project settings.

The MainConcept results were strange enough that we actually retested the Quadro K6000, just to make sure we weren't seeing a fluke. In the MainConcept AVC test, the Quadro 6000 is actually faster than any other solution -- and by no small margin. Clearly either Sony or MainConcept hasn't revisited its encoding optimizations since Kepler came out. In XDCAM-EX, the FirePro family is actually faster than the Quadro cards, by a nice margin, while the Sony XAVC encode hands a win to the FirePro W9000 -- not the FirePro W9100.     

Yeah, we're not sure about that one either, but again, the numbers held up on re-test. Add up all three times in this test, and the W9000 wins with a 3:25 render time, followed by the Q6000 (3:38), the W9100 (3:47) and the K6000 (4:17).