CheckMag | AMD re-entering the workstation GPU market is a force for Nvidia to reckon with

Since the introduction of CUDA in 2006, Nvidia has been consistently dominating the GPU market. With software developers such as Autodesk implementing optimizations for CUDA in Revit etc., AMD’s chances of getting a slice of the workstation market seem bleak. But that has not prevented AMD from releasing its latest workstation GPUs based on the RDNA 3 architecture in 2023.

This time it seems that AMD is not only just releasing new hardware, but new software to boot such as Radeon Pro Render. To date Blender, Houdini, Unreal Engine, 3DS Max, Maya and Inventor have plugin support for Radeon Pro Render. In the latest version of Blender 3.6, the improvements made in HIP RT enables the RX 7900 XTX to speed up render times ranging from 1.11 to 1.31 times faster when compared to prior versions of Blender.

Despite the large strides in performance improvements, AMD still has a long way to go in optimizing the RX 7900 XTX if it aims to beat the RTX 4080 with the Optix render. For example, in the Junkshop scene, the RTX 4080 with Optix enabled could render the scene in 28 seconds while the RX 7900 XTX completed the render at close to 50 seconds.

On the AI side of things, AMD has managed to improve the RX 7900 XTX by 9.9 times in AI text-to-image generation with Stable Diffusion by enabling Microsoft Olive. Although AMD still lags behind Nvidia in driver optimizations for productivity applications, the current pricing for the Radeon Pro W7900 48GB at US$3,999 might be able to entice workstation users away from the US$6,800 RTX 6000 48GB.

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