AMD’s dual Fiji graphics card is targeted towards developers and workstation usage scenarios. While it’s not technically marketed as a gaming card, the Radeon Pro Duo is the fastest graphics card on the market surpassing NVIDIA’s current flagship, the GTX Titan X. Of course, this isn’t surprising given the use of two Fiji cores which incurs a hefty price. The Radeon Pro Duo is estimated to launch at $1499 which explains why AMD hasn’t focused their efforts on showcasing its gaming performance. Up to this point, the GPU’s performance gains compared to the GTX 980 Ti were unclear. However, Expreview have just released a number of benchmarks at 1920×1080 and 4K which makes for some very interesting reading:
As you can see, the Radeon Pro Duo manages to leverage decent performance gains in popular games between 14.31% and 34.73% compared to the GTX 980 Ti. It really comes into its own during synthetic benchmarks.
Once the resolution is increased to 3840×2160, there are significant gains which makes for a much more fluid and consistent frame-rate. According to these results, the Radeon Pro Duo can achieve around 60 frames-per-second using extreme details in some games. However, it’s still not powerful enough to achieve this in visually demanding games like The Witcher 3. Clearly, the GPU manages good improvements but it’s not enough to warrant the price tag. In contrast to this, the card’s compute performance might be useful for developers or individuals requiring a powerful setup in workstation environments.
AMD doesn’t look like they are sampling the graphics card to outlets with a focus on gaming performance. This isn’t surprising because it overlooks the Radeon Pro Duo’s main focus. Not only that, the 4GB video memory could be a limiting factor especially on a card costing so much.
Do you think the Radeon Pro Duo should be analyzed as a gaming card?
you get 50% more performance by bolting two cards together? who’d of thunk it.