News AMD announces FirePro W9100 32GB graphics card

In the world of professional rendering, VRAM is everything.

It will be an easy choice for most of the prospective buyers needing this kind of card.

 

Eh... it's probably not as important as you might think. For example, now that pretty much all modern GPUs offer compressed data in VRAM, that reduces the need for so much of it. That's why for a while, many nvidia GPUs could compete against their AMD counterparts even though they had less VRAM (back when AMD didn't use compression).

Another thing to keep in mind is the bandwidth of VRAM. It doesn't matter how quickly it fills up because as long as everything you need to process will fit, the time it takes to clear out the old data is minimal. Workstation users [usually] aren't constantly streaming data into VRAM like a gamer is.

Lastly, if the software you're using involves DX11 or newer, it is possible to use your regular system memory for video use.


The way I see it, GPUs like this are designed for data servers, not workstations. I find it very hard to believe that most workstation users can saturate 16GB (in other words, filling up 16GB excluding buffers and caches).

 

Data server usage certainly explains all the displayports on the back.