This new Intel GPU also delivers high performance on AI workloads as well as professional workstation 3D computer graphics. As AI increasingly infuses our common workloads, the Xᵉ2 GPUs on the Intel card feature dedicated AI hardware and matrix engines, known as Intel Xᵉ Matrix Extension (XMX). Each Vector Engine is paired with an XMX AI engine capable of 2048 FP16 ops/clock and 4096 INT8 ops/clock.

General Introduction

For our Architosh readers, we have focused on AEC/O application workloads rather than AI performance workloads. Readers are advised to refer to this and this for additional information on the B50’s performance characteristics for AI workloads.

Intel Arc PRO B50 is an SFF, Dual-Slot workstation-class GPU with impressive performance characteristics and excellent value, priced at an MSR of 349.00 USD.

We reviewed our Intel Arc PRO B50 on our trusty BOXX APPEX E3 workstation running the Windows 10 Professional operating system. This is the same exact rig and setup as all our past GPU card reviews, dating back to the AMD Radeon Pro W6600 GPU in the fall of 2021. The Intel GPU is priced at 349.00 USD (suggested retail price).

For purposes of direct comparison, we also tested an NVIDIA RTX A1000 GPU, which sells for between 404 and 508.00 USD (in other words, similarly priced). We will use these prices (using the lower number) for the purposes of our GPU economics charts and calculations (see page 3). In other words, when we compute performance on a per-dollar basis between the Intel Arc PRO B50 and the NVIDIA RTX A1000 reference card, we will use 404 USD for the calculations on the Nvidia side.

GPU Details: Intel Arc PRO B50

The B50 is a small form-factor (SFF) dual-slot GPU card that boasts 16 GB of GDDR6 memory, which is twice the amount provided by the Nvidia RTX A1000 reference GPU. Built on the new Xᵉ2 Architecture, the BMG-G21 GPU provides excellent performance across AAA games, workstation graphics, and running ML/AI workloads. Key details include:

• 128 Xᵉ Vector Engines
• 128 XMX Matric Engines
• 16 Ray Tracing Units
• 170 TOPS (INT8)
• TSMC N5 node (19.6 B / 272mm2)

• PCI Express x8 Gen5 (x16 Physical)
• OpenGL 4.6 / Vulkan 1.4 / DirectX 12 Ultimate / OpenCL 3.0
• 16 GB GDDR6
• 224 GB/s memory bandwidth
• 4 Displays (up to 8K120 HDR) (DisplayPort 2.1) (4X 4K120 HDR)
• Up to 7680×4320 @ 60Hz (DisplayPort 2.1)
• 70W max power consumption (no auxiliary power needed)
• SFF, Dual Slot
• VR Ready

The Intel BMG-GPU SoC (System on a Chip) is illustrated in the image at the bottom of the page. Click on the image for a larger view to see details of the chip design.

New Design and Chip Architecture

The Intel Arc PRO B50 is a discrete GPU card built by Intel, and the famed semiconductor company says it has taken feedback from its A-series customers and redesigned the platform and thermal solution, improving efficiency and acoustics. In our own testing, we were impressed with how quiet the unit was under multiple testing scenarios and general usage.

The Intel Arc PRO B50 is installed in our BOXX testing workstation. The SFF, Dual-slot GPU card does not require auxiliary power and runs from the PCIe slot itself. The overall installation and setup of both the card and the driver software were straightforward.

The actual GPU card is striking visually, with Intel’s signature blue being incorporated as accents and on an entire side of the CPU. As for the new compute architecture, the updated second-generation Xᵉ2 Architecture features a wider SIMD16 width for improved efficiency and compatibility, as well as a 33% larger L1 cache with a total capacity of 256 KB. The Ray Tracing Units are also second generation in this B50 GPU, and the benchmarks and visuals during testing attest to the strength of Intel’s GPU solution.

A side-view of the Intel Arc PRO B50 GPU card. Intel redesigned the thermal architecture in this B-series version.

In fact, for AEC workloads, which we focus on here at Architosh, the rendering performance of the Intel Arc PRO B50 makes this GPU a surprisingly good choice for lower-tier workstations. But we are jumping ahead of ourselves, but you will see it in the benchmarks we provide below (we do all of our testing ourselves).

The Intel Arc PRO B50 is powered by the MBG-G21 GPU SoC (system on chip). (click to make larger).

Since benchmark performance is where the rubber meets the road, let’s go to the next page to see how Intel’s latest professional GPU card stacks up against its primary Nvidia competitor and even some previously reviewed GPU cards and SoCs.

next page: Benchmarking and Performance Results

The post Product Review: Intel Arc Pro B50 GPU for Workstations appeared first on Architosh.

General Summary

This graphics card is a professional application-oriented GPU board designed for use in professional workstations. It has been on the market for quite some time, but recently, Nvidia sent us a version to review, and we have done the most exhaustive review of a GPU to date. We should note that the last mid-tier professional GPU we reviewed was from AMD with its Radeon Pro W6600, which was designed to compete with this GPU’s immediate predecessor, the Ampere-generation RTX A4000. Because we never reviewed this GPU’s predecessor, we have relied on some published benchmarks below.

Nvidia’s mid-tier 4000-class GPU models are generally ideal for AEC professionals who are involved in a fair amount of real-time and photo-realistic rendering workflows, whether in supplement to BIM or not. This is also the case for product design and MCAD professionals; those doing more rendering workflows will see greater value benefits from this GPU. (see Conclusions on the last page for more info).

Image 1: Nvidia’s RTX 4000 Ada generation GPU for workstations is the most powerful professional workstation-class single-slot GPU in the market. (Image: Nvidia)

The RTX 4000 Ada GPU is the successor to the RTX A4000 Ampere generation GPU. For the purposes of our GPU economics charts and calculations, we are using MSRP pricing for the 4000 Ada GPU at USD 1,250, while the initial price for the Ampere generation predecessor GPU was USD 1,000 when first released in April 2021.

The Nvidia Ampere generation GPU we tested and reviewed was the RTX A2000 SFF GPU, and we have carried over benchmarks for non-direct comparison. The Ampere generation’s rival AMD Radeon Pro GPU was the W6600, which we also reviewed a few years ago. Again, we have carried over some comparison benchmarks.

Image 2: The Nvidia RTX 4000 Ada GPU inside our BOXX Technologies testing workstation. The GPU cannot draw all its power from the PCIe slot, so it includes a standard 16-pin 12VHPWR connector for direct connection to the power supply. (Image: Architosh)

In-house benchmarking is a tough business, especially if working on different systems. That is not our case. Our review of the RTX 4000 Ada GPU ran on the same BOXX workstation as our previously reviewed GPUs under the same Windows 10 Professional operating system.

While we will summarize our conclusions at the end of the review, some highlights about the RTX 4000 Ada GPU to bring up now include the following:

• Most powerful single-slot GPU for professional workstation computing
• substantial performance gains in apps like V-ray, Arnold, and Blender
• DLSS is supported in Enscape and upscales with AI
• Ada generation brings dual encode/decode engines (2 encode / 2 decode engines)
• AD1 code support
• Excellent ventilation with blower style thermal design versus gaming card thermals

The RTX 4000 Ada GPU is powered by Nvidia’s AD104 graphics processor, built on TSMCs 4nm process node. The 4N node is a custom node designed for Nvidia and differs from its regular N4 node. The custom node for Nvidia lays an emphasis on its power efficiency.

Image 3: The Nvidia AD104 chip powers the Nvidia’s RTX 4000 Ada GPU. The chip is built on TSMC’s 4nm process node. (Image: Nvidia)

To put the chip into perspective, the die area is around 294 mm² and contains 35.8 billion transistors. The predecessor chip in the A4000 Ampere was the GA104 chip with 17.4 billion transistors, similar in size to Apple’s M1 chip at 16 billion transistors. We bring up the M1 because we will make some comparisons to SoCs in our review. The important take-away is that there are twice as many transistors in this Ada generation RTX 4000 GPU.

GPU Economics

As part of our review work, we like to compare GPUs on a performance-per-dollar basis, but we calculate this a bit differently than the common formula. We divide the cost of the chip or GPU by the benchmark score to obtain the cost of one compute unit (i.e., the cost in dollars to obtain one unit of measure on the benchmark). In our charts, our notation for “compute unit” is “CU.”

• Cost in USD per Compute Unit (CU) =  cost of GPU / benchmark score

You can see this kind of metric in our review of a GPU workstation here. We began this type of benchmark because we have begun research into methods of economically optimizing workstation configurations across both GPU and CPU for specific workflows. Such work is in an early phase and explained in a feature article titled, “BIM Manager: The Economic Value of Workstation Performance,” inside Xpresso newsletter #44.

Our GPU economics charts are partial and selective, but hopefully informative. This kind of metric allows you to compare the value proposition of different chips, especially in isolation, to a specific application or type of workflow. However, one must keep in mind that benchmark scores alone do not tell the whole story of “value” or “performance,” as overall system performance impacts GPU performance. Furthermore, workstation-class GPUs offer other tangible and intangible benefits, including the certification of professional applications.

Since we have so many benchmarks to test, which ones do you select for performance per dollar calculation and comparison? We have selected three:

• (1) Creo and Solidworks (OpenGL-based) composite tests
• (2) Creo (OpenGL shaded and edge performance) tests
• (3) Cinebench GPU (Redshift Renderer) tests

The first two are SPECviewperf tests and are widely regarded for OpenGL-based 3D CAD applications. Redshift is widely deployed across DCC apps plus all of Nemetschek Group’s AEC BIM solutions as a render option. We review these three performance per dollar metrics at the end of our Benchmarking section below.

GPU Details: RTX 4000 Ada

Nvidia’s RTX 4000 Ada generation GPU is a full-size single-slot GPU that boasts 20 GB of video memory, which is more than the 16 GB that shipped on its predecessor Ampere generation GPU. Details include:

• 6,144 CUDA Cores
• 48 3rd-gen RT (raytracing) cores
• 192 4th-gen Tensor cores
• 26.7 peak TeraFlops single-precision (FP32)
• Nvidia AD104 chip

• PCI Express 4 x 16 for advanced data transfer
• OpenGL 4.6 / Vulkan 1.3 / DirectX 12 Shader Model 6.7
• 20 GB GDDR6 with ECC memory
• 360 GB/s peak memory bandwidth
• 4x DisplayPort 1.4a
• 2x 7680 x 4320 @ 60 Hz max resolution
• 130W max power consumption
• Single-Slot, full height, 4.4″ H x 9.5″ L
• VR Ready

Compute APIs support CUDA 12.2, OpenCL 3.0 and DirectCompute. Nvidia NVlink = no.

Those are the specs at a glance. This is Nvidia’s most powerful single-slot GPU ever and the ideal GPU for demanding professionals across CAD industries like AEC, DCC, MCAD, in addition to science, medicine, energy, financial and software development.

Image 3.1 — Nvidia RTX 4000 Ada GPU, showing its blower-style thermal design. (Image: Nvidia)

As generative AI technologies begin to dominate the focus of professional application workflows, the Nvidia RTX 4000 Ada GPU unlocks accelerated AI compute workloads. We have also noted the new DLSS support for Enscape, which stands for Deep Learning Super Sampling), which is AI-powered upscaling. This game-inspired technology enables game rendering at lower resolution and then uses deep learning to upscale the image to a higher resolution. This technology is inside the popular AEC rendering software Enscape, starting with version 3.1.

next page: Benchmarking and Performance Results

The post Product Review: Nvidia RTX 4000 Ada GPU appeared first on Architosh.

Economics

AMD’s latest professional GPU is well-timed for a challenging economic context. After two years in pandemic survival mode, many businesses are seeing exploding demand yet struggling to find qualified talent. The net result means firms must be even smarter today about their information technology budgets as salaries and sign-on bonuses rise.

From this view, AMD’s Radeon Pro W6400 delivers a valuable option, offering the pro-market the most affordable GPU with capacity for real-time, hardware-accelerated raytracing graphics. Like its AMD RDNA 2 Architecture big siblings, the new GPU taps the excellent Radeon Pro Software for graphics management, performance tuning, recording, monitoring, and more. It also supports Viewport Boost technology to accelerate real-time raytracing in applications like Twinmotion and Revit, for example.

AMD launched its Radeon Pro W6400 with real-time raytracing at half the cost of its rival NVIDIA. The new GPU offers all the other benefits of its AMD RDNA 2 Architecture, plus a dead-silent fan and strong OpenGL performance per cost benchmarks.

With a 229 USD MSRP, the W6400 also delivers excellent performance per dollar metrics for a wide range of dominant CAD industry workflows. This is especially true for AEC users working with small to medium-sized models in SketchUp and leading BIM applications, as well as MCAD users working in average-sized models and assemblies predominantly in OpenGL viewports rendered with shaded with edges with and without anti-aliasing. (see our test results section below).

The Raytracing Value Proposition

Most AEC and MCAD users face tight deadlines and tend to optimize their software tools to allow for the fastest workflows. There is considerable pressure (and need) for knowledge about optimizing viewport responsiveness across nearly all CAD/BIM tools. That issue isn’t going away.

Now combined with that pressing demand is the reality that real-time raytracing is truly here and is transforming workflows in both AEC and MCAD. In AEC, it means that architects can loop in views of their building designs with much more realistic raytraced shadows and lighting as part of their iterative design workflow.

One of the things that impressed us with the W6400’s arrival was its packaging. It was quite enjoyable to open this up. Somebody has learned a thing or two from Apple! Click on the image for a larger view. The main specs are on the box.

The industry is also moving (though it will move slowly according to a Tech Soft 3D executive we recently spoke to) from older generation graphics engines like OpenGL to the utilization of more modern, low-level APIs like Vulkan and Metal, and DirectX 12. As CAD and BIM developers modernize their software’s graphics pipeline, real-time raytracing is beginning to factor into future workflow options.

Autodesk is working on its One Graphics system, Dassault Systèmes has Project Romulan, the Nemetschek Group in the near future will proliferate its Redshift Renderer throughout its daughter companies’ digital tools, and Tech Soft 3D has a new partnership with Chaos. From this perspective, AMD’s entry-level workstation GPU gets included (not excluded) in future innovations with rendering engines that will leverage real-time raytracing in the viewport. This should give buyers some assurance.

AMD Radeon Pro W6400

The newest AMD RDNA 2 Architecture workstation GPU is built on a 6nm process node, features 16 MB AMD Infinity Cache (L3), and 4 GB of high-performance GDDR6 memory.

Like its big sister GPUs (W6600, W6800, etc), it features hardware-accelerated raytracing, in this case via 12 Ray Accelerators. Importantly, this newest Radeon Pro GPU is also VR-ready (more on tests below) and supports AMD’s unique Viewport Boost technology useful for apps like Revit and Twinmotion. Other key details include:

• 768 Stream Processors
• PCI Express 4.0 Support for Advanced Data Transfer
• DirectX 12, OpenGL 4.6, OpenCL 2.2, Vulkan 1.2
• 4GB GDDR6 memory with 128-bit memory interface width
• 128 GB/s peak memory bandwidth
• 2 x DisplayPort 1.4
• 7680 x 4320 Max resolution
• 50 watts (Peak Power) / no connectors
• Single-Slot, Half Height, 6.6″ length (SFF capable)

The AMD Radeon Pro W6400 sustains 3.54 Peak Teraflops (FP32), compared to AMD’s Radeon Pro W6600 at 10.4 Peak Teraflops, the bigger sister GPU we do a lot of benchmark comparisons to in this article. The GPU with its 5.4 billion transistors has OS support for Windows 10, 11, and Linux.

Business Apps

Before we jump into our CAD/BIM/3D testing benchmarks, a quick note about the W6400 is in order. AMD sees this GPU as an excellent solution for SFF and entry-level workstations directed at mixed business loads, across various industries, not just those industry segments connected to the CAD markets.

AMD’s own research shows that most users who would buy this GPU prefer two 2K displays, a single 4K display, or a 4K and 2K display dual setup. Thus, AMD saved costs and provided two DisplayPorts. It can also power two 5K displays or a single 8K display. 

AMD also sees the Radeon Pro W6400 as an excellent upgrade choice for existing workstation owners using similar-sized SFF based GPUs or as a better option than NVIDIA’s similarly priced T600, a GPU that does not support real-time raytracing at the hardware level. It is also half the price of NVIDA’s newest SFF pro-GPU the RTX A2000, a graphics card that performs similarly to AMD’s W6600 we reviewed recently.

In comparison to the NVIDIA T600, the W6400 performs anywhere from 4 percent to about 63 percent faster at a range of tasks. It is particularly faster at photo editing (63 percent) and rendering and visualization (42 percent), based on AMD’s own benchmarking.

next page: Benchmarking and Performance Results

The post Product Review: AMD Radeon Pro W6400 GPU for Workstations appeared first on Architosh.

The big news about this tiny GPU is it supports NVIDIA’s hardware-accelerated real-time RTX raytracing technology. And it does so in a low-profile GPU form-factor that works ideally in SFF (small-form-factor) workstations. SFF workstations are often found in architecture and engineering practices because they take up less space.

Given our more dominant AEC focus at Architosh, the folks at NVIDIA provided us with this new RTX A2000 GPU so we could give it a good spin in both benchmarks and real-app testing. And that is precisely what we have done.

NVIDIA RTX A2000 Details

Before we jump into the results, let’s cover the basics of this Ampere generation tiny GPU. First off, the card is so tiny it almost feels cute. But don’t let this fool you. The RTX A2000 packs a very decent punch.

NVIDIA’s RTX A-series lineup for the workstation market. Lower left, the double-slot RTX A2000. Upper left: RTX A6000. Upper Right: RTX A5000, and lower right, single-slot RTX A4000. Only the A2000 can fit in tiny SFF (small form factor) workstations. (Image: NVIDIA / All rights reserved.)

The unit comes with 6GB of GDDR6 ECC memory, and there is an optional version with 12 GB. One will find 4x Mini DisplayPort connectors on the backside (see images below). Despite being small and low-profile, the RTX A2000 is a doublewide card. It can work with a low-profile bracket or a full-height bracket like ours was sent to us. It supports PCI Express-4.

RayTracing

The RTX A2000 brings NVIDIA’s workstation-class hardware-accelerated raytracing technology down to the entry-level workstation-class GPU range. In the previous workstation generation GPUs, RTX technology stopped at the Quadro RTX 4000, and everything under that was RT-free, meaning no raytracing cores.

The tiny fan on the rather tiny A2000. One issue we talk about at the end of this article is the fan noise.

The RTX A2000 delivers 8 peak TeraFlops single-precision (FP32) performance, compared to its previous generation at half that value. From our recent review on AMD’s new GPU, our readers learned that our own reference NVIDIA GPUs, the Quadro P4000, has 5.2 peak TeraFlops (FP32). We will be referencing that unit in some of our benchmarks below.

The RTX A2000 possesses ‘second-generation’ RT cores with hardware-accelerated motion blur and 2x faster raytracing. We tested the raytracing and CUDA cores using Chaos’ V-Ray-based rendering benchmark. (see charts below). In terms of cores in general here is the breakdown:

• 3328 CUDA cores
• 26 second-gen RT (raytracing) cores
• 104 third-gen Tensor Cores

Installing the RTX A2000 was straightforward. We dropped it into our 2021 year model BOXX Technologies testing workstation. The card is powered entirely through the PCI bus; the A2000 has a TDP of just 70 watts.

Performance Tests

At Architosh, we have been trying to establish a suite of “cross-platform benchmarks” and real-world app tests as much as possible. In this case, however, fewer cross-platform benchmarks were deployed. We focused a bit on proprietary CUDA and RTX technology.

The RTX A2000 features NVIDIA’s 8nm GA106 GPU, 276m2, 13.2 million transistors, manufactured by Samsung.

Our tests utilized OpenGL, OpenCL, and DirectX graphics APIs—all representative of industry-wide leading tools and workflows across multiple 3D/CAD industries. Here is a listing (in order) of our benchmarks and tests:

• SketchUp TTD FPS — an OpenGL real-world application set of timed tests using our own set of files.
• Twinmotion — we did run NVIDIA’s free FrameView tool in the background to monitor frame rates.
• CompuBench (SubDivision) — OpenCL GPU compute on SubDivision surface level-5 test.
• CompuBench (Subsurface Scattering) — OpenCL GPU compute rendering test.
• GFXBench (Tessellation) — OpenGL mode test
• GFXBench (Texture – Fill Rate) — OpenGL mode test
• VRMark (Orange Room) — a VR test to see if your GPU is ready to power VR headsets.
• V-Ray 5 Benchmark — RTX and CUDA tests were run.

This set of benchmarks and tests looks at OpenGL-based viewport performance in shaded, textured, and shadowed 3D models, GPU rendering across OpenCL, CUDA, and RTX technologies, and OpenGL-based geometry mesh generation (OpenGL 4) and texturing performance.

next page: Performance Results and Closing Recommendations

The post Product Review: NVIDIA RTX A2000 GPU for Workstations appeared first on Architosh.

In August, we received our Radeon Pro W6600 and honestly were quite excited to test this particular unit due to its unique combination of features and price-point. You see, the W6600 GPU boasts both real-time, hardware-accelerated raytracing hardware, unique Viewport Boost technology, plus a solid 8GB of GDDR6 memory, all at a very attractive price-point.

AMD’s new AMD Radeon Pro W6600 GPU is quite ideal for the AEC market and other pro markets looking for a great value in performance per dollar metrics with bonuses like hardware-accelerated raytracing and other special technologies. (click to enlarge images)

To be a bit blunt, this card is squarely aimed at the architecture side of the AEC market, but as we note later in the article, the performance of this GPU for the dollar makes it an attractive option for those leveraging value across their organizations. 

AMD RDNA 2

Typical in the industry, the newest chip microarchitecture arrives in the much larger computer game industry GPUs first. The award-winning AMD RDNA 2 Architecture has come this summer in the Radeon Pro line dedicated to professional engineering software markets like 3D, CAD, and BIM.

MORE: AMD Releases RDNA 2 Pro Graphics Technology — New Radeon Pros

These Radeon Pro W6000 series GPUs are built on an advanced 7nm manufacturing process, enabling AMD’s best performance per watt performance efficiency in the professional markets. The W6600 also features AMD Infinity Cache technology (128MB) integrated on the GPU die directly to reduce latency, plus Smart Access Memory. This feature provides AMD Ryzen 3000 and 5000 series CPUs direct access to the entire high-speed GDDR6 memory on the GPU. We tested the W6600 inside a Boxx workstation using the 11th generation Intel i7 CPU, so we could not experience that feature. Other key specs follow:

• 1792 Stream Processors
• PCI Express 4.0 x16
• DirectX 12, OpenGL 4.6, OpenCL 2.1
• 8GB GDDR6 memory with 128-bit memory interface width
• 224 GB/s memory bandwidth
• 4 x DisplayPort 1.4
• 7680 x 4320 Max resolution
• 130 watts (Peak Power) / 1-6 pin
• Single-Slot at full height required (length = 9.5″)

The Radeon Pro W6600 sustains 10.40 Peak Teraflops (FP32), compared to AMD’s new flagship Radeon Pro W6800 at 17.83 Peak Teraflops. We will be comparing this GPU to the NVIDIA Quadro P4000, at one point the world’s most powerful single slot professional graphics card. The P4000 has 5.2 Peak Teraflops. Its successor graphics card, the RTX 4000 has 7.1 Peak Teraflops. Both of those GPUs are still available and selling and for a considerable price premium over the W6600. But more on that later.

Ray-Tracing Accelerators

These are the very first Radeon Pro workstation graphics cards with real-time, hardware-accelerated raytracing rendering technology. AMD refers to their enhanced compute units for raytracing as “Ray Accelerators.” 

AMD’s RDNA2 Architecture features hardware-accelerated real-time ray tracing technology to rival NVIDIA’s RTX technology.

With interactive real-time renders like Enscape, Twinmotion, Lumion, and others democratizing the photorealistic rendering process for large swaths of architectural professionals previously not focused or trained on tools like 3ds Max, Maxwell, and V-ray, there is considerable potential in the workstation market for a GPU like the Radeon Pro W6600. 

The W6600 also features AMD Radeon Pro Viewport Boost. This technology is limited at the moment to just a few applications — including Twinmotion, which we tested on—but works to speed up FPS (frames per second) performance on large project files. 

Viewport Boost

With Viewport Boost turned on (see screenshot below), compatible applications see a massive boost in performance. AMD reports Revit, 3ds Max, and Twinmotion see up to 214 percent, 143 percent, and 139 percent speed up gains, respectively, for those three applications. Additionally, Unreal Engine 4 packaged projects are also Viewport Boost accelerated. 

AMD’s Radeon Radeon Pro Settings App. The Performance settings window where Viewport Boost technology gets turned on. Radeon Pro Settings is a full-featured application that enables users to monitor performance metrics in real-time, manage GPU settings, and record and stream content from games, for example.

What “Viewport Boost” does is adjust the viewport resolution in real-time as you move around in your scene. More significant scenes tax your system harder, slowing down ‘real-time rendered viewports’ and thus slowing down the interactiveness of apps like Twinmotion. Viewport Boosts lowers the resolution at variable rates to keep up the FPS interactivity of your work. 

We tested this feature in Twinmotion and captured data using NVIDIA’s free FrameView, a performance and power benchmarking app. This app produces a ton of data on GPU frame rates, rendered present latency (RPL), and power testing. Using FrameView, serious gamers use the 99th percentile calculations to compare minimum frame rates to average frame rates to gauge a game or application’s smooth or consistent frame rates. The closer these two numbers are, the less micro-stuttering during gameplay or when the movement in a scene is at its maximum. 

Viewport Boost is a technology aimed directly at this same interaction—quick movement of a scene while maintaining acceptable rendering resolution. The goal is an ideal balance between frame rates and rendering resolution. Not surprisingly, FrameView generated different results with Viewport Boost “on” compared to “off.” 

We had Twinmotion set up to ultra settings and the AMD Radeon Pro W6600 powered our modest scene incredibly smoothly. Our scene below with incremental (rain) weather animating and set to Ultra settings on everything, we freely navigated around the scene with pans, zooms, obits, etc.

In our Twinmotion scene, FrameView scores showed a marked improvement with Viewport Boost turned on with the average FPS rate and the 99th percentile FPS rate moving from “23.3 over 17.98 FPS” to “23.5 over 20.79 FPS” (or putting these numbers over each other, 1.29 vs. 1.13). If the average frame rate and the 99th percentile were identical (a theoretical ideal), a game or 3D software would be ideally smooth and consistent, with zero micro-stutter while moving quickly in scenes. 

Twinmotion—among the group of three pro apps compatible with AMD Radeon Pro Viewport Boost technology—is the least performative, with Revit being the most. We didn’t test with 3ds max or Revit but were quite happy to see the data and even more experience the effect of Viewport Boost while inside Twinmotion. Moreover, our Twinmotion model looked and performed its best on this Radeon Pro W6600 compared to an Apple iMac Pro with an AMD Vega Pro 56—the machine we used to build the scene two years ago. 

next page: Radeon Pro Crushes Through Benchmarks

The post Product Review: AMD Radeon Pro W6600 GPU for Workstations appeared first on Architosh.

Architosh’s interest in this review aligned with our interest in the upcoming new modular workstation Apple is developing for introduction in 2018. Unlike the forthcoming iMac Pro which contains an integral display, the “modular” Mac Pro Apple has promised its loyal pro users will need its own display or multiple displays. As one thinks about what that machine may become it’s time for its future customers—one of which I hope to be—to begin thinking about good monitor options. BenQ—as a monitor company—is making products that Apple’s pro users should be thinking about and consider.

01 – The BenQ 27 PD27QC Design Series monitor is meant for CAD/Animation workflows.

For this review Architosh setup the new BenQ monitor to a new Apple MacBook Pro with the Touch Bar. The BenQ PD2710QC is particularly ideal for designers and technical CAD users alike who are touting one of Apple’s latest pro laptops. Let’s take a look now to understand why this monitor is something you should be shortlisting for your future display needs, whether on Mac or PC.

The BenQ PD2710QC—Overview on its Design

The BenQ PD2710QC (which I will call the BenQ 27 for the rest of this article) sports a lovely and minimal bevel edge design. (image 01) It is a two-toned affair with a matt black finish wrapping the screen front and edge with a space gray metal finish that compliments the black surfaces. The aluminum looking material is a plastic material, it is not a metal. The build quality feels and looks excellent; there are a heft and solidness to this display without any sense of unnecessary weight.

02 – BenQ 27 out of the box in all its glory.

03 – Back of display with video port types at right and power I/O at left.

04 – The adjustable arm’s plate slots into firmly and easily.

While on the subject of how this display looks and feels it is very much warranted to note just how smooth but stable the adjustable arm mechanism is. I was surprised at how easy the display moved up and down and yet it stayed exactly where you put it. The same is true of pivoting (rotation about the horizon axis). In these two movement functions, the BenQ 27 feels as high quality as any Apple display including the iMacs themselves.

05 – Final assembly from the rear of the unit.

The BenQ 27 consists of three fundamental parts. The first part is the large flat display itself. (image 02) It is finely detailed with a ribbed vented zone that separates the space gray metal plastic back panel from the matt black-edged display itself. (see images 02 – 04). Next is the arm with a twin-grooved adjustable slots mechanism for moving the display up and down on the arm off of a pivoting radius joint. (image 05) That part too has a matching veneer zone of space gray metal plastic. There is a reveal between the two colored materials throughout this monitor that provides a most distinctive touch.

06 – The base of the unit serves as an I/O hub with USB-C as the primary simplified connection to the MacBook Pro with Touch Bar—supplying power, data, video, and I/O.

The final part is the base which houses an electronic board for all the I/O. (image 06) This base consists of a slightly sloped top which is designed to hold your laptop (see images) or park a keyboard when not in use. If you like the screen very close to you one could, theoretically, type from this position with their keyboard positioned on this plane.

next page: Connecting It To Your Computer

The post Product Review: BenQ 27-in PD2710QC Display Monitor for CAD & Animation appeared first on Architosh.

This new graphics card from Sapphire is the first of its kind from the company for the Mac market. Like us, many longtime Mac users may not know of this company, which has been an ATI (now AMD) Add-in Board (AIB) partner for many years now.

The Sapphire HD 7950 Mac Edition is identical to its PC-based version and even–at least with our test kit–shipped with two CDs, one for Windows drivers and one for Mac OS X. Presumably we could have installed our Mac Edition board directly into a Windows box. (see image 01 below)

The Sapphire HD 7950 has 3 GB of GDDR5 memory, the most memory ever available to a Mac GPU that we know of. Let’s summarize the specs quickly and then we’ll get into our testing process.

• 850 Mhz with Boost to 925 Mhz Core Clock
• 3 GB of GDDR5 memory (VRAM)
• 384-bit memory interface
• I/O: 1x HDMI (with 3D), 2x Mini-DisplayPort, 1x Dual-Link DVI-I
• 28 nm process, 1792 x Stream Processors

There are many more details about the Sapphire HD 7950 but we’ll point you to the official product page for those. The one key item we want to point out is the compatibility.

01 – The Sapphire HD 7950 Mac Edition, is cased in white, unlike the PC versions, and there are several of those. This card takes up two slots and should be ideally placed in one of the two PCIex16 expansion slots.

Officially this new GPU from Sapphire requires Mac OS X Lion (10.7.5) and was created to offer an upgrade path for users of Mac Pros from the past few generations. The company makes reference to the Nvidia 8800 GT series GPUs commonly used in these machines. They recommend 2 GB of minimum RAM and an early 2009 Mac Pro (MacPro4,1). Our minimum recommendations are a bit different.

• 2008 Mac Pro (MacPro3,1)
• 4 GB of RAM (given the load from the operating systems (10.7 or 10.8) 4 GB is what you really need
• Mac OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.3)

For our test purposes we installed the Sapphire card into an aging Mac Pro with those stats above. Our (MacPro3,1) tower was outfitted originally (BTO) with a Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT with 512 MB of 256 memory. The specs on this GPU can be found here. Some key comparison data included for this reference card include:

• 600 Mhz Core Clock
• 512 MB GDDR3 memory (VRAM)
• 256-bit memory bandwidth

Based on Sapphire’s website our testing scenario is basically identical to what this GPU card was created for: replacing GeForce 8800 GT’s in aging Mac Pros with something fresh and new.

Our Test Suite

While others have already tested and reviewed this graphics card, here at Architosh what concerns us most is professional CAD and 3D applications, not games. On the other hand, some of the best OpenGL tests are in fact games oriented.

For our more “Pro” oriented tests we are still interested in frames per second but less so than other metrics which suggest a benefit befitting of CAD and 3D applications. We tested OpenCL performance and did a selection of hand-evaluative tests using a few Mac professional applications, in particular Trimble’s popular SketchUp.

Architosh GPU Test Suite:

• Cinebench 11.5 by Maxon Computer – (download link)
• LuxMark (download link)
• OceanWave OpenCL Test (download link)
• UNIGINE Heaven Benchmark  (download link)
• UNIGINE Valley 1.0 Advanced (download link)
• Trimble SketchUp
• Vectorworks

In the future we will endeavor to improve upon this test suite in a direction that puts even more emphasis on professional applications, especially the types of CAD and 3D applications readers of Architosh are using. We have detailed explanations of each test in what follows.

next page: Test Results for Sapphire HD 7950

The post Product Review: AMD Sapphire HD 7950 Mac Edition appeared first on Architosh.

Matrox GXM Options for the Mac Platform

There are two key products that can serve the entire current line of Mac computers: Matrox DualHead2Go DP Edition and Matrox TripleHead2Go DP Edition. In this review we took a look at the DualHead2Go DP Edition GXM unit (see image 01). And we tested it on a mid-year 2009 MacBook (MacBook 5,1) with a 2 GHz Intel Core Duo processor and Nvidia GeForce 9400M graphics chip with 256 MB of memory.

For older Macs that do not use the Mini DisplayPort Maxtrox has both a digital and analog series of products (Matrox DualHead2Go Digital Edition and Matrox TripleHead2Go Digital Edition; and Matrox DualHead2Go Analog Edition and Matrox TripleHead2Go Analog Edition, respectively) to serve you. And in addition to these products video professionals on the Mac can also be served up more Mac friendly hardware that work in conjunction with these units.

01 – DualHead2Go GXM unit. As you can see next to an aluminum 2009 MacBook the unit is relatively tiny, perfect for carrying with you on business travel if need be.

The unit itself is a smallish, black metal box of punched-holed metal about 4 x 5 x 1.5 inches total–very discreet, tidy and attractive. On one side consists display ports and on the opposite side a USB port for powering the unit and another single DisplayPort. (see image 01 above) Standard items shipping with the unit include DisplayPort to DisplayPort input cable, USB cable for powering the device from your computer and the Getting Started CD.

There are two key things you will need to get started. First, you will need a Mini DisplayPort to DisplayPort adapter cable if you are using a Mac (such as a MacBook). This is sold separately for about 35.USD. Secondly, you will need to download the Matrox PowerDesk software for Mac in order to fully configure the product. The PowerDesk software for Mac installs key software and a new Matrox control panel to your Mac’s preferences. (see image 03 below)

The Matrox PowerDesk software for Mac comes in a standard OS X installer package and provides you with various settings organized across three windows. This is a native OS X application and sits inside your Applications folder. Once opened you can access the Matrox GXM Control Panel, which is also accessible from within your System Preferences, from inside the PowerDesk app.

Next page: Configuring the Unit

The post Product Review: Matrox DualHead2Go DP Edition appeared first on Architosh.