In response to the new Mac Pro 7,1 from Apple, AMD has updated its workstation graphics card lineup with the Radeon Pro W5700 line using AMD's RDNA graphics architecture offering support for six display outputs, including one over USB-C.
6 Display Ports And 8K Resolution
When it comes to comparisons with other graphics cards against its main rival, the Nvidia Quadro RTX 4000, the Radeon Pro AMD claims the W5700 to be 18% more power efficient, both under load and at idle.
AMD claims that the W5700 is also better at handling multitasking performance, with 5.6 times better application workflow performance in the SpecViewPerf 13 benchmark while under CPU load compared to the Quadro RTX 4000.
That said these comparisons with the Nvidia products is a moot point when looking at macOS powered computer workstations with the lack of support and provision of drivers for Nvidia products for macOS.
The Radeon Pro W5700 comes with six display outputs, with five mini DisplayPort connections alongside a single USB-C port, with 15W of power delivery, with the card also offering up to an 8K resolution for video.
The spec sheet breaks the resolution support at 60Hz refresh down to…
6 @ 1920x1080
6 @ 3840x2160
3 @ 5120x2880
3 @ 7680x4320
Alternative For The New Mac Pro As Well As Other Macs In An eGPU
The card should be in the frame for anyone considering Apple's modular Mac Pro, which could be offered as an alternative to the Radeon Pro Vega II and Duo graphics cards available for the new style cheese-grater.
The Vega II and Duo can only be used in one of the Mac Pro's MPX Module bays because the W5700 uses PCIe 4 means it will work in any of the PCIe 3 slots on the Mac Pro 7,1, as well as in eGPU cases that you could use with the latest Mac Mini, iMac, iMac Pro and MacBook Pro computers.
More Processing Power And More Power Efficient
AMD is claiming that the Radeon Pro W5700 is the world's first computer workstation graphics card that uses a 7-nanometer process to make the GPU.
The Radeon Pro W5700 offers 36 compute units and 8GB of GGDR6 memory, offering up to 8.89 teraflops at the top end. The card also has 448 gigabytes per second of memory bandwidth, and with the change to the RDNA graphics architecture, AMD is claiming a 25% performance improvement over the previous GCN architecture, and a thermal design point of 205 Watts and the W5570 has been designed to be more power-efficient by offering up to 41% higher average performance per Watt over GCN used in the Radeon Pro WX8200.