After teasing a major reveal for a few days now, AMD today announced the Radeon PRO W6800, the company’s new workstation graphics card. On paper, the card is a shoo-in for video editors — delivering faster rendering speed and consistent performance when powering video editing applications.
AMD announced the Radeon PRO W6600 and W6600M alongside the W6800 as well. All three of these graphics cards make up what the company is calling the Radeon PRO W6000 series.
Here are five key takeaways from the AMD reveal:
Radeon PRO W6800 utilizes RDNA 2 Architecture
The RDNA 2 Architecture is a standard graphics card for many high-power PCs and laptops today, plus even a few of today’s game consoles (Xbox Series X|S). It’s a respectable Architecture and it (seemingly) dramatically improves the Radeon PRO W6800’s overall performance and speed. According to AMD in a press release, the Radeon PRO W6800 is the fastest RDNA workstation graphics card the company has ever created because it utilizes RDNA 2 Architecture.
You can expect much faster rendering
In an industry where time is money, creatives need to minimize their downtime as much as possible, which makes fast render times critical. The Radeon PRO W6800 (should) increase render times by 46 percent with Realtime Hardware-Accelerated Raytracing when compared to Radeon PRO graphics cards.
AMD included Infinity Cache
AMD claims in its press release that the Radeon PRO W6800 delivers the highest RCNA workstation GPU performance to date — at least on paper. Nevertheless, the W6800 does (seemingly) deliver impressive performance. It offers up to 128MB of last-level data cache integrated on the GPU die. Ultimately, the system reduces latency and power consumption across the board.
There’s support for Smart Access Memory
With Smart Access Memory, AMD graphics cards can use the entire GPU memory — resulting in better performance and bottlenecks (components that limit the potential of other hardware). According to AMD, you can expect higher performance for professional workloads when your system includes the W6800.
The card also supports Viewport boost
AMD included its Radeon PRO Viewport Boost technology. With it, today’s professional creatives can work on huge files without a dip in performance. The technology helps the Radeon PRO W6800’s viewport frames-per-second performance increase whenever working on large files.
Here’s a breakdown of the new graphic card’s specs:
- Stream processors: 3840 (60 CUs)
- TFLOPS: Up to 17.83 (FP32), Up to 35.66 (FP16)
- 32GB at 16 Gbps
- Memory bandwidth: 512 GB/s
- Memory interface: 256-bit
- Display outputs: 6x Mini-DisplayPort 1.4
Pricing and availability
The AMD Radeon PRO W6800 graphics card is out now for $2,249. The other model, the Radeon PRO W6600 graphics card, will release in Q3 of this year for $649. As for the Radeon PRO W6600M model, it’ll be available in the HP Fury ZBook G8 mobile workstation in July 2021.
