AMD makes powerful graphical workstations more affordable with new graphics cards

Anyone looking for a desktop with more than enough graphics power for scientific applications or CAD work can soon order the AMD Radeon Vega Frontier. This graphics card will not be available on the market until next month, due to the lack of independent information about the GPU. A leak of some test scores, however, tells us what we can expect: a competitor for Nvidia that brings business graphics performance to a significantly sharper price point.

The Vega Frontier costs about 1,050 euros (excluding VAT) and is opposite the Nvidia Quadro P5000, a card for which you soon shed more than 2,000 euros. As with the new AMD's new AMD processor, the manufacturer will once again offer an alternative to what the market leader brings, but at a significantly lower price. The tests of an early Frontier card model suggest that AMD's gpu is more or less on par with Nvidia's, and at half the price.

The Radeon Vega Frontier, like the Quadro P5000, is meant for business use. The drivers are optimized for professional applications such as CAD programs, video editing and post-production, and machine intelligence. Therefore, you'll find the cards almost exclusively in powerful business desktops or in some cases in servers and high performance computing (HPC) systems.

The aggressive pricing strategy of AMD for both GPUs and CPUs ensures that previously priced workstations suddenly become a lot more affordable, even for smaller companies or self-employed.

Flexible hardware

Apart from the price, AMD has another asset. As a rule, business gpu's like Quadro's are not suitable for playing games. For this you need a gaming gpu, such as a copy from the Nvidia GeForce series. Although business and gaming cards do not really differ, the drivers make sure they are not interchangeable. This has to do with support, but also with margins: for professional GPUs, manufacturers are asking a lot more than gaming equivalents. AMD is now sweeping its front: the Frontier Edition gets a gaming mode, allowing you to work as a gaming computer in a single business workstation.

Sounds nice but in practice irrelevant? Then you probably do not think about the march of virtual reality. Developers who develop VR applications use gaming technology. They can now start with a business gpu desktop where they previously needed a separate device with gaming hardware.

For the technicians

The AMD Radeon Vega Frontier Edition is based on AMD's 14 nm Vega architecture. Vega is brand new. The card uses High Bandwidth Memory 2 (HBM2) for the first time: a memory technology that is many times faster than classic GDDR5 memory that you find on other graphics cards. The Frontier card receives 16 GB of HBM2. The bus width is no less than 2048 bits. HBM2 cards are a lot faster than their predecessors in specific workloads, such as real-time rendering of 3D image in high resolutions.

The card has 64 compute units on board, good for 4096 stream processors. AMD itself writes a piece of hardware of 13.1 teraflops for 32 bit floating point operations.

Competitor Quadro P5000 from Nvidia has 2560 Cuda cores on board (not directly comparable to AMD's stream processors). The P5000 also has 16GB of memory, but uses classic GDDR technology. Nvidia claims a calculation power for his 8.9 teraflops card.

The leaked benchmark tests on which we base our initial assessment should take you with a grain of salt. The tested card did not yet have the final drivers, which could have a major impact on performance. Although the P5000 in the chart below (through Extremetech) usually performs better than the Vega Frontier Edition, you can assume that the difference in the final model will be at least a lot smaller.