Three New Radeon Pro WX Series Cards, Based on Polaris Architecture, Debut at SIGGRAPH

AMD announced at SIGGRAPH that it is developing an ambitious new high-performance video card that will incorporate a 1 TB frame buffer connected directly to the GPU via PCIe, enabling extremely low latency operation when working with large quantities of data, including VR and 8K video production.

AMD says Radeon Solid State Graphics (SSG) can accelerate scrubbing on an 8K video timeline from 17 fps to more than 90 fps, a roughly fivefold increase in performance. The company called it a fundamental change to workstation architecture.

Developer kits will be made available to approved applicants for $9,999 starting later this year; full availability is scheduled for 2017.

For workflow that chews up video data a litle less aggressively, AMD released three graphics cards in the new Radeon Pro WX Series — the first workstation cards based on the company's Polaris architecture. At the high-end, the Radeon Pro WX 7100 GPU is aimed directly at content creation with a sub-$1,000 price point. (AMD said the GPU passes the SteamVR Performance Test, a benchmark for VR rendering performance.) The Radeon Pro WX 5100 is aimed at product development and design visualization, and the Radeon Pro WX 4100 is tuned for "mid-range application performance," such as CAD, on small-form-factor workstations.

All of the Radeon Pro WX series cards come with a three-year limited warranty and a seven-year extended liited warranty, AMD said. Support for HEVC and VP9 encode and decode at 4K resolution is built-in along with DisplayPort 1.4 (including HDR) and HDMI 2.0 display support. They are also compatible with the open-source GPUOpen intiative.

Finally, AMD said it is releasing its physically based rendering engine, Radeon ProRender, as part of its GPUOpen open-source initiative. Radeon ProRender plug-ins are available for applications including Autodesk 3ds Max, Dassault Solidworks and Rhino, with a Maya plug-in in development.