AMD announces its Radeon Pro VII its 20.Q2 drivers and ProRender 2.0

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Update AMD Radeon ProRender May 2020 !

While we are still waiting for news of Navi 2X and its versions for servers, which should finally make it possible to turn the Vega page, AMD launches a «new» Radeon Pro VII. For the occasion, it brings online drivers and a renewed Pro Render engine.

While NVIDIA needs to make a set of announcements aimed at professionals tomorrow night, AMD is doing the same... to a lesser extent. Indeed, they are mainly new versions of existing elements more than real novelties preparing for the future.

The Radeon VII passes Pro

Let’s start with the Radeon Pro VII. A map with a strange name for the manufacturer’s corporate graphics cards. As its name suggests, it is based on the little popular Vega architecture. We note that this name is not mentioned in the press release or in the elements intended for the press.

However, it is not a Radeon VII with a simple modified ventirad. It incorporates its 7 nm GPU and most of the features, including the 16 GB of HBM2 at 1 TB/s, but it has a Pcie connector 4.0 x16. Thus, it is rather a Radeon Instinct MI50, not passive since thought for workstations.

Its frequencies have been slightly reduced, but good news: we are entitled to a calculation power of 13.1 TFLOPS (FP32) and 6.5 TFLOPS (FP64). As a reminder, this was what was planned for the Radeon VII before AMD changed its mind just before the launch and halved these figures.

AMD Radeon VII: Do we have to crack?

Another advantage: it takes advantage of all the features of the Radeon Pro, where it was not the case with the Radeon VII, even when the right drivers were installed. An Infinity Fabric Link connector is available to connect multiple cards together at speeds up to 168 GB/s.

The card offers six Mini DP 1.4 outputs, without USB Type-C which is therefore always reserved for the Pro W5700 (Navi, 7 nm). Power is supplied by a pair of 6+8 pin connectors.

On the tariff side, count $1,899, $199 for the interswitching bridge. To pass the pill, AMD reminds that it is much less than the competing solutions or that its product has superior characteristics to the Quadro RTX which have the advantage of offering units dedicated to calculations related to AI or ray tracing.

So it will be up to the tests to decide.

20.Q2 and Pro Render 2.0 Drivers

In the wake, AMD announces its Radeon Pro 20.Q2 drivers. They do not yet seem to benefit from the new interface set up for the general public, and in its blog post, the manufacturer does not highlight any real novelties. Thus, they are simply announced as performing better than the 19.Q2.

AMD praises the low power consumption of its cards and their multi-tasking capability with these drivers, but these are arguments already mentioned earlier.

Download the latest AMD drivers

Another evolution, more notable: Radeon Pro Render 2.0, available in beta. This engine, distributed in the form of a plugin for the various 3D rendering applications has been completely reworked. Still open source, it adopts the more permissive Apache 2.0 license, especially for distribution in third-party applications.

It also takes place within the Gpuopen program and adopts its new credo: CPU+GPU optimization. Thus, a Radeon Pro VII and a Ryzen Threadripper 3990X would be 47% faster than the GPU alone according to tests performed on an internal stage (Breakfast Room).

AMD takes advantage of the recent release of the Unreal Engine 4.25 to announce the release of a compatible plug-in, managing Vulkan and Opencl for path tracing renditions. Those for other applications have been updated and sometimes improved, especially for Blender 2.83 support for example. All details are given here.