Third Party Hardware > GPU Compute / Accelerators
Radeon Pro vs regular Radeon cards - worth the price premium for POWER users?
FlyingBlackbird:
The german computer magazine "ct" (www.ct.de) did test the Blender raytracing performance with different graphics cards including a Radeon RX 5700 XT und Radeon Pro W5700 in ct 01/2020 pages 100 - 101.
One finding was (my personal translation):
--- Quote ---During the test AMD's Radeon Pro W5700 showed incorrect lighting and streaking artifacts using the pro driver 19Q4 - with the standard driver and an RX 5700 or a Radeon VII (Vega) this was not the case.
--- End quote ---
IMHO this is just a "spotlight" test and may be caused by a bug in the pro driver but it shows that the standard driver and the cheaper RX 5700 (XT) are working quite well...
pocock:
This generation of cards doesn't have full hardware ray tracing support, I don't know if that is also a factor in that particular issue.
Many of the reviews of the RX 5700 and W5700 mention that the current NVIDIA cards may be better for people who need ray tracing. But the NVIDIA drivers are less open than the AMD driver and may not work on POWER.
The previews of the next generation AMD Radeon "big navi" cards suggest they plan to add full ray tracing support and close the gap with NVIDIA but we may not see any cards like that until the end of the year. That may eliminate the type of issue described in CT magazine.
For me, that means I'm tempted to use cheaper cards, such as the RX 5500 with 4GB or even something older from ebay as a temporary solution for six months. I don't specifically need ray tracing but would like to have the overall combination of features, for example, AV1 support and lower power consumption.
MPC7500:
I wonder what happened to nVidias OpenSource announcement?
pocock:
I created a separate thread with some observations about NVIDIA, maybe it would be better to discuss specifics of their drivers there.
pocock:
As there are multiple threads about this, I felt it would be useful to create a wiki page about GPU selection criteria
Feel free to improve it. A shortlist of products tested by Raptor and other experienced users might be useful too.
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