AMD claims that the WX 5100 is the fastest 75-watt workstation GPU. The mid-range AMD Radeon Pro WX 5100 replaces last year’s FirePro W5100. The performance of the new AMD Radeon Pro WX 5100 compared with previous generation AMD FirePro boards. AMD claims that the combination of all these innovations is “a next-generation graphics architecture that is up to 2.8 times more power efficient while helping improve visual quality with high-dynamic range display and media encoding and decoding quality for the latest content.”

The Polaris architecture is implemented using custom and adaptive circuit designs that dynamically run the silicon at the highest frequency and lowest voltage possible, further boosting the energy efficiency of Polaris-based graphics processing units (GPUs). According to AMD, the Polaris architecture also leverages these additional transistors for new intelligent features such as “aggressive primitive culling,” which helps to improve performance and energy efficiency, and quality-of-service to reduce contention between graphics and compute shaders. All three are based on the company’s fourth-generation Graphics Core Next (GCN) technology, but are now manufactured using a 14nm FinFET process that reduces active power consumption and provides more transistors to allow for more compute units and cache.

The new Radeon Pro WX series consists of three new boards, based on AMD’s Polaris architecture: the Radeon Pro WX 4100, Radeon Pro WX 5100 and Radeon WX 7100.

With the release of AMD’s new Radeon Pro WX series, the name and the ATI red, white and black color scheme appear to be history. AMD continued to use the FirePro name on its professional workstation-class cards until now. In early November 2016, AMD began shipping the latest generation of its professional workstation-class graphics cards, first announced at last year’s SIGGRAPH conference (see “ AMD Launches New Graphics Cards).” It has been a few years since we last had an opportunity to do a hands-on review of the company’s graphics boards, so we were quite pleased when a new AMD Radeon Pro WX 5100 arrived at our test lab.Īlthough AMD has long been known as a competitor to Intel in the CPU market, the Sunnyvale, CA company moved into graphics in a big way in 2006 when it acquired Canadian graphics card manufacturer ATI and took over development of the ATI FirePro graphics boards.

Amd firepro w4100 2gb review