ANAHEIM, CA — AMD (www.amd.com) made a number of announcements at the SIGGRAPH show taking place in Anaheim. The new Radeon Pro WX Series of professional graphics cards harness the Polaris architecture and are designed to deliver exceptional capabilities for the immersive computing era. The new Radeon Pro WX series graphics cards are optimized for open source software and are designed for creative professionals and those pushing the boundaries of science, technology and engineering.
The Radeon Pro WX 7100 GPU is capable of handling demanding design engineering and media and entertainment workflows and is AMD’s most affordable workstation solution for professional VR content creation. The Radeon Pro WX 5100 GPU is well suited for product development. And the Radeon Pro WX 4100 GPU provides a high level of performance in a half-height design, bringing mid-range application performance demanded by CAD professionals to small form factor workstations
AMD formally launched ProRender and moved to GPUOpen at SIGGRAPH. The company’s powerful physically-based rendering engine is becoming open source, giving developers access to the source code. As part of GPUOpen, Radeon ProRender (formerly previewed as AMD FireRender) enables creators to bring ideas to life through high-performance applications and workflows enhanced by photorealistic rendering. GPUOpen is an AMD initiative designed to assist developers in creating ground-breaking games, professional graphics applications and GPU computing applications with much greater performance and lifelike experiences, at no cost and using open development tools and software. Unlike other renderers, Radeon ProRender can simultaneously use and balance the compute capabilities of multiple GPUs and CPUs – on the same system, at the same time. Radeon ProRender plug-ins are available today for many popular 3D content creation applications, including Autodesk 3DS Max, SolidWorks by Dassault Systèmes and Rhino, with Autodesk Maya coming soon. Radeon ProRender works across Windows, OS X and Linux, and supports AMD GPUs, CPUs and APUs as well as those of other vendors.
Also at SIGGRAPH, AMD announced it is developing a new Radeon Pro solution for large dataset applications, which will be available initially as a developer kit. Starting at a full terabyte of Radeon Solid State Graphics (SSG), this innovative Radeon Pro technology will provide more than an order of magnitude greater memory capacity compared to existing GPU memory implementations, enabling vastly higher performance and ideal for the next wave of demanding use-case scenarios including realtime post production of 8K video, high-resolution rendering, VR content creation, oil and gas exploration, computational engineering, medical imaging and life sciences.
During a demonstration of a Radeon Pro SSG solution, 8K raw video timeline scrubbing was accelerated from 17 frames per second to 90-plus frames per second. Applications for developer kits are now being accepted and full availability is planned for 2017.