When AMD first announced the Radeon Pro W6800 Graphics Card, my first thought was that I had misheard. Surely, they weren't releasing a 32-gig card—that’s four times the amount of its predecessor! Which is insane. Turns out, I didn’t mishear. AMD really did release a 32GB workstation GPU. And we were lucky enough to test it out.
Radeon Pro W6800: Specs and Features
As the headliner of the Radeon Pro W6000 series, the Radeon Pro W6800 is AMD's most powerful workstation card to date. Featuring a truly bonkers 32GB of GDDR6 memory with ECC support, the W6800 is a huge step up from its predecessor, the Radeon Pro W5700, which only had 8GB of memory. It's also significantly more powerful than the other workstation cards in the W6000 series, the Radeon Pro W6600 and W6400.
While 32GB of RAM might be the Radeon Pro W6800's most conspicuous feature, it's hardly the only one worth talking about. Check out this comparison table to see how well the Radeon Pro W6800 stacks up against its predecessor and the other AMD W6000 series workstation GPUs.
The table doesn't cover every key spec—just enough to illustrate the staggering differences between the W6800 and the other workstation cards. One feature not mentioned on the table, but definitely worth discussing, is the number of display outputs the Radeon Pro W6800 supports.
Featuring six—yes, six—Mini DisplayPort 1.4 ports, the Radeon Pro W6800 can simultaneously drive up to six 5K monitors or two 8K monitors. Not sure what kind of Bond-villain/mission-control setup you're running that you need six 5K monitors, but just in case you do, the W6800's got you covered.
Radeon Pro W6800: Performance
To see how the Radeon Pro W6800 would fare in a professional workflow, we put it through a series of real-world benchmark applications, as well as some timed rendering tests we performed ourselves.
All tests were conducted on a Ryzen 5000-based testbed (full specs below), with up-to-date versions of Windows 11 Pro, AMD Adrenalin, and NVIDIA Studio. During our tests, display resolution was set to 4K (3840 x 2160) unless stated otherwise.
Video Encoding
For our encoding tests, we used Adobe Premiere Pro to test AVC and HEVC video encoding. The Radeon Pro W6800 returned fast times for both our 4K and 8K encoding tests. It performed especially well in the HEVC tests, where it dominated our NVIDIA 3080 Ti card by a considerable amount.
DirectX
We used 3DMark and VRMark to measure the Radeon Pro W6800's DirectX performance. Specifically, we wanted to see how well the Radeon Pro W6800 scored on the Raytracing (DXR), variable rate shading (VRS), and mesh shaders tests, as these features are especially important to professional designers and creators.
The 3DMark benchmarks didn't return many surprises. The Radeon Pro W6800 scored about where we thought it would—usually in the same neighborhood as its consumer-class counterpart, the Radeon RX 6800.
One thing we did find particularly noteworthy about the 3DMark tests is that was while the W6800 didn't match up well against our NVIDIA 3080 Ti gaming card (not surprising, considering these are essentially gaming graphics tests), it bested the NVIDIA RTX A4000 in the Raytracing, mesh shaders, and VRS benchmarks.
In VRMark's Cyan and Blue Room tests, the Radeon Pro W6800 scored twice as many frames per second (FPS) as its predecessor. In the Cyan Room test, which measures DirectX 12 performance, the Radeon Pro W6800 scored over 350 FPS. In the Blue Room test, which measures DirectX 11 performance and is the most demanding VRMark test, the W6800 scored just shy of 100 FPS.
Power Consumption
To test power consumption, we used 3DMark's Fire Strike Ultra stress test. Here, the Radeon Pro W6800 performed very well. Despite having twice as much memory as its gaming-card equivalent, the AMD RX 6800, the Radeon Pro W6800 drew the same amount of power, proving it to be incredibly power efficient.
Radeon Pro W6800: Verdict
When it comes to workstation GPUs, the question isn't whether a card is good or not. It's whether that card is good for you. By all standards of measurement, the Radeon Pro W6800 is an absolute beast of a GPU. It comes with 32GB of ECC GDDR6 RAM. It can output up six 5K HDR (or two 8K UHD) monitors at once. It has 3,840 stream processors, 128MB of AMD Infinity Cache, and 26.8 billion transistors.
But do you need 32GB of memory? Do you need an absolute beast?
You might. If you're a 3D animator who needs all the frame buffer you can get or a designer working on a ridiculously massive viz project, then sure, the Radeon Pro W6800 is an excellent choice for your workload. The same can be said of other large-scale projects or applications, such as 8K encoding. However, if your workload is a bit more mainstream, then you might be better served by a less beastly, less expensive card, such as the Radeon Pro W6600.
Workload considerations aside, there is a lot to love about the Radeon Pro W6800. Video encoding performance was excellent, besting its predecessor by considerable margins and, in some tests, surpassing even our NVIDIA 3080 Ti card. Notably, the Radeon Pro W6800 performed especially well working with 8K footage. Similar to what we saw with the W6600, the W6800's rendering and viewpoint performance were also very good. Frugal power consumption, ultra-fast PCIe 4.0-backed transfer speeds, hardware Raytracing, resizable BAR and variable rate shading—the list goes on.
However, and again, the question isn't whether the Radeon Pro W6800 is a good card (it very much is). The question is whether it's a good card for you. The answer to that question depends on your workload. If you're working on projects that demand high-level performance and/or monstruous amounts of memory, then yes, we definitely recommend the Radeon Pro W6800. If you don't need quite so much buffer, but still want top-tier performance, we'd advise you to check out AMD's other W6000-series workstation cards, such as the Radeon Pro W6600 or W6400.
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