advertisement
Facebook
X
LinkedIn
WhatsApp
Reddit

AMD unveils the power hungry Radeon Pro Duo

We have official word from AMD regarding its latest GPU, the Radeon Pro Duo.

The first thing you’ll notice is that AMD has crammed as many numbers into this card as they possibly can and for good reason; this card has been created for gaming and content creation at that wonderful, ultra high definition (UHD).

So let’s take a look at the numbers shall we?

The first thing you’ll notice is the power draw. According to AMD the card will need 350W of power coming to the card through three 8pin power supply connectors. Erm, AMD, did you folks not get the memo about power efficiency?

To be fair, the Radeon Pro Duo does use a closed loop water cooling system to keep its two GPUs from burning a hole through the centre of the Earth, so that will use a whack of power.

AMD has once again drawn on its 28nm Fiji XT graphics processor and has opted for 8GB of the newer High Bandwidth Memory that we saw in the R9 Fury.

The core clock speed of the card is set to run at up to 1 000MHz with the total memory bandwidth coming in at an incredulous 1 024GB per second. That speed does require that the motherboard has a PCI Express 3.0 PHY lane which not all motherboards have.

The Pro Duo uses an all-in-one liquid cooling solution which does contribute to the 350W power draw of the card.
The Pro Duo uses an all-in-one liquid cooling solution which does contribute to the 350W power draw of the card.

The card also supports DirectX 12, Mantle, OpenGL, Vulkan and OpenCL 2.0 APIs and of course, AMD’s FreeSync technology.

Has AMD finally made a decent card?

The real test of a GPU however is in its numbers and looking at the benchmarks on WCCFTech, AMD has a winner on its hands.

Looking at 3DMark’s FireStrike Ultra benchmark which is designed to push your PC to the limits gives the Pro Duo a score of 6848 while the Fury X only got a score of 3957.

In Tom Clancy’s The Division, the card pushed out 58.5 frames per second at Ultra settings compared to the admirable 44.6 frames per second the Fury X pushed.

Of course, the question we’re all asking is how the Pro Duo stacks up against its competition, the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti.

Well in apples to apples comparisons the Pro Duo wipes the floor with the 980 Ti averaging a 59.4% increase in performance.

As to the price of the Pro Duo, it’s just as big as the rest of the card.

At the moment AMD has started pricing for the Pro Duo at $1 500 (R21 634.86). That’s quite a substantial fee especially when you consider that a EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti retails for $679.99 (R9 807.66) at the moment.

There is no word on when, or even if the Radeon Pro Duo will be coming to South Africa but if it does it will be in very small numbers.

Remember that this card has been designed for those ready to take on the challenge that is gaming at 60fps at UHD resolutions and for folks that want to create content in those parameters as well.

[Source – AMD]

advertisement

About Author

advertisement

Related News

advertisement