AMD introduced SIGGRAPH 2016 attendees to several new technologies at its “Capsaicin” press conference Monday night. The new Radeon Pro WX Series made its debut, and AMD formally launched ProRender — marking its move to GPUOpen — and showed how Radeon Solid State Graphics Technology is primed to transform workstation PC architecture.
The Radeon Pro WX Series of professional graphics cards are a powerful solution for modern content creation and engineering, harnessing the award-winning Polaris architecture and delivering exceptional capabilities for the immersive computing era. The cards take a fundamentally different approach for professionals, being optimized for open source software and designed for creative professionals and those pushing the boundaries of technology.
The WX Series cards are designed to address specific content creation demands: WX 7100 GPU can handle demanding engineering, media and entertainment workflows and is AMD’s most affordable workstation solution for professional VR creation. WX 5100 GPU is ideal for product development driven by game-engine visualization. And WX 4100 GPU provides great performance in a half-height design, offering mid-range application performance apt for CAD professionals to small form factor workstations.
AMD’s Radeon ProRender (formerly FireRender), a powerful physically-based rendering engine, is going open source through the company’s GPUOpen initiative, allowing creators to bring their ideas to life through high-performance applications and workflows enhanced by photorealistic rendering. Uniquely, ProRender can simultaneously use and balance multiple GPUs and CPUs on the same system for state-of-the-art GPU acceleration, producing rapid, accurate results.
Plugins are available now for Autodesk 3ds Max, SOLIDWORKS (Dassault Systemes/Rhino) and coming soon to Maya. ProRender works across Windows, OS X and Linux, and supports AMD GPUs, CPUs and APUs as well as those from other vendors.
Last but not least, AMD announced it is developing a new Radeon Pro solution for large dataset applications, which will launch initially as a developer kit. Starting a full terabyte of Radeon Solid State Graphics, the new tech will provide more than an order of magnitude greater memory capacity compared to existing GPU memory implementations. This means vastly higher performance, ideal for the increasing demands of use-case scenarios like real-time post-production in 8K, high-res rendering, VR content, and so much more. During the first-ever demo of Radeon Pro SSG, 8K raw video timeline scrubbing was accelerated from 17 frames per second to a whopping 90-plus fps.
Applications for dev kits are being accepted now, with full availability planned for 2017. Apply online through the Radeon website.
