With their initial consumer desktop and mobile RDNA 3 graphics products now out the door, AMD today is turning their attention to the professional visualization market. The more lucrative end of the GPUs-for-graphics business, the professional visualization (proviz) market is a small but important segment of the larger video card market, with workstation users asking for more RAM, more I/O, and more support than a consumer graphics card can provide. Served by AMD’s long-running lineup of Radeon Pro video cards, today AMD is announcing the next generation of high-end workstation cards, the Radeon Pro W7900 and Radeon Pro W7800.
The first workstation-class cards based on AMD’s new RDNA 3 GPU architecture and associated Navi 31 GPU, the new Radeon Pro cards kick off the overall Radeon Pro W7000 family. The W7900 and W7800 are roughly analogous to AMD’s consumer Radeon RX 7900 XTX and 7900 XT cards, offering two tiers of high-end performance at different prices, and aimed at slightly different markets. Though both cards come with identical feature sets, including ECC memory support and, for the first time in any video card, full DisplayPort 2.1 UHBR20 support – the highest bandwidth mode that the DisplayPort specification provides.
These cards, in turn, are aimed at the traditional workstation market. Which is to say CAD, CAM, 3D animation/rendering, video editing, visual effects, and increasingly, the AI acceleration of all of the above. Many of these are tasks that require vast amounts of VRAM, and many of them are also primarily rasterization-bound, which has played well to AMD’s architectural designs in the last couple of generations.