FirePro W9100 – The Fastest Graphics Card for Adobe CC?

Yes, and no.

It’s really that simple.

The FirePro W9100 is the fastest Graphics Card for Premiere Pro – right? Yes it is. Just.

Is the FirePro W9100 the fastest graphics card for Maya? Yes it is. Just.

The FirePro W9100 is the fastest GPU for Davinci Resolve – right? Yes it is. Just.

We are talking professional graphics cards here, and, yes there are plenty of exceptions. But there’s one thing for sure – the Open CL Tidal Wave is coming and the FirePro W9100 is riding the crest. AMD has come a LONG way in just two years time to get neck and neck with NVIDIA in the professional realm. With 16GB of VRAM, you can work in 4K, 6K and even 8K resolutions effectively – a claim only a very small group of GPUs can make. And what graphics card can run six 4k displays concurrently? Only the AMD FirePro W9100. Want to do 4 color node editing of Red Dragon 6K footage in DaVinci Resolve in real-time? NAB 2014 made it clear the FirePro W9100 is an excellent choice, and this goes for RedcineX workflows as well. And it’s some $1500 less than the Quadro K6000.

Tom’s hardware published an excellent article on the W9100 recently, which also illustrates NVIDIA is still very strong – they’re still certainly the dominant player in the workstation graphics market. On the product design side the Nvidia Quadro K6000 is the fastest card for PTC Creo 2.0 – even the Quadro K5000 outperforms the W9100 in this app – and the NVIDIA Quadro K6000 is the fastest graphics card for Catia V5 and V6 as well. We also noticed whether on our i7-X mediaworkstations, our i-X or i-X2, CPU performance in NVIDIA GPU equipped machines is higher in every instance compared to AMD GPU equipped units. Superior coding? Probably. Aside from the obvious, if your Maya workflow includes a strong mix of CPU-intensive processes, you may still be a bit better off going NVIDIA.

One other note – if you work in an OpenCL framework, and you are on a budget, the FirePro W7000 is the best pro graphics card available, price for performance. It is a single slot card, meaning you have lots of room for expansion even with two or three cards on board, can run up to 4 high resolution displays at once, and is neck and neck performance-wise with the $1800 NVIDIA Quadro K5000 for less than half the cost. Also, the W8000 and W9000 provide only small performance improvement over the FirePro W7000 in the lion’s share of instances, which should help explain why you notice only these two AMD pro cards on our site.

All for now – we’ll have some new video up including new client Neel K. who directed the trailer for the latest Call of Duty installment as well as more industry professionals whose expertise we’ll explore to help support the work you’re all up to.