AMD vs NVIDIA for Professional Workstations
Updated October 2024
You might assume that professional workstations only contain ultra-powerful processors, but this is not the case. In modern professional workstations and servers, many utilise the same core components you’d find in your average PC gaming rig, generally all developed by either AMD or NVIDIA.
Each brand offers a product line designed for those requiring some serious power- AMD’s Radeon Pro range and NVIDIA’s RTX Series. These graphics cards offer the most bang for your buck when it comes to peak performance.
There are hundreds of think pieces comparing these brands with regards to gaming- but how do these GPUs fare in a more demanding environment, such as for AI or HPC? Find out in this blog.
AMD Radeon
If you’re building a machine that is required for dense rendering tasks, machine learning or AI then the general consensus is you’ll need as much VRAM as possible. VRAM is significantly faster than conventional RAM as it’s on the GPU itself. The increased latency plus slower speeds from RAM alone are rarely going to be enough for really demanding applications, regardless of how much RAM is installed or how fast the CPU might be. This is why VRAM is so important.
AMD workstation GPUs have always traditionally lagged behind NVIDIA counterparts, with AMD more famous now for providing chipsets. However, AMD are now offering many products worth considering, from their W6000 range to the recent W7000 series, which we’ll be discussing here.
On one end, there’s the W7500 GPU which provides good quality at a more affordable price point. With only 8GB of GDDR6 RAM and peak teraflop performance of 34.6, it won’t be the fastest or most powerful graphics card in the world, but for workstation users using less demanding applications, it would be ideal for smaller form-factor machines.
On the other end of the spectrum, there’s the Pro W7900 card. With a whopping 48GB of GDDR6 RAM and peak teraflop performance of 122.64, as well as 3 of AMD’s new DisplayPort™ 2.1s and their Radiance Display™ Engine with 12-bit HDR, this GPU would be a powerful addition to workstations requiring high performance and display quality.
Both cards utilise AMD’s new RDNA™ 3 architecture, which introduces AI acceleration, their Radiance Display™ Engine and a chiplet design.
NVIDIA RTX
On the higher end, NVIDIA’s RTX A6000 offers enhanced performance at a slightly higher price point. This provides 48GB of dedicated GDDR6 VRAM and a peak teraflop performance of 309.7, more than double offered by the W7900.
Nvidia’s lower-end RTX A1000 is also slightly more expensive, providing the same amount of RAM at 8GB of GDDR6, but once again offers higher peak performance at 53.8 teraflops.
The first workstation GPUs to be built on the NVIDIA Ampere architecture, and also the first to support PCIe Gen 4, this is the first workstation GPU range by NVIDIA in many years to drop the “Quadro” branding. But they remain Quadro in all but name, offering scalable and reliable performance with plenty of niche features for specialist users. There’s also support for NVIDIA virtual GPU (vGPU) software, which allows a workstation to be repurposed into multiple high-performance virtual workstation instances.
Which should you go for?
When it comes to benchmarks alone, an NVIDIA card is always going to provide the best results. However, in professional applications, sheer power is far from the only important factor. It’s about what you can realistically achieve with the hardware and what kind of return you’re getting on your investment. In that regard, it’s a little closer to call between NVIDIA and AMD.
Ultimately, whether you’re an AMD or an NVIDIA user is going to depend on your individual use case. For those building deep learning and AI machines or those regularly rendering complicated 3D environments, the A6000 might be the only card that really suits your needs right now.
For mid-tier users, however, AMD GPUs offer the best value to performance ratio by some margin.
Whichever you settle on, we’d love to help you integrate it into the workstation of your dreams. If you’d like to learn more about the workstations we offer, or you want to chat about which GPU would best suit your use case, feel free to get in touch with us here.