The dedicated ‘Ray Accelerators’ can either be used to bring ray tracing effects to real time applications like Unreal Engine or accelerate traditional photorealistic ray-trace renderers to produce stills and animations faster.Īs AMD’s ‘Ray Accelerators’ are so new there aren’t that many applications that can currently take advantage, but this is changing. The AMD Radeon Pro W6600 and the W6800 are AMD’s first pro GPUs to feature hardware-accelerated ray tracing.
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It’s supported by pro drivers and is certified (or in the process of being certified) for many of the leading professional applications.Īdvertisement The Radeon Pro W6600 is a single slot GPU with four DisplayPort outputs Hardware ray tracing With four DisplayPort outputs it can drive up to four displays at 4K resolution or up to two displays at 8K resolution. It has a peak power of 100W, so is suitable for entry-level tower workstations, and needs a 6-pin connector to draw extra power from the PSU.
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In terms of specs, it’s a full height, single slot PCIe 4.0 board. The AMD Radeon Pro W6600 is essentially a replacement for the Radeon Pro W5500 (8 GB, 5.35 TFLOPs), but it features enhanced Compute Units (CU) with dedicated ‘Ray Accelerators’ to provide an entry point for hardware-accelerated ray tracing. With an estimated street price of $649, it fits within a price bracket that architects are more likely to be comfortable with. With 8 GB of GDDR6 memory and 10.4 Teraflops of Single Precision compute performance, the Radeon Pro W6600 is significantly less powerful than the AMD Radeon Pro W6800 (32 GB, 17.83 Teraflops). To cater to CAD users who want to embrace more demanding workflows, AMD recently launched the Radeon Pro W6600, one of two pro GPUs based on the company’s 7nm RDNA 2 architecture. In such applications you’ll likely get the same 3D performance from a $200 pro graphics card as you would from one that costs ten times as much. So, if you only ever design buildings in Revit, Archicad, Vectorworks or similar, there’s little point in buying a high-end pro GPU. Most CAD and BIM software is CPU limited, shackled by the frequency of a single CPU core. The problem is that many architects don’t have workstation graphics hardware capable of effectively running these demanding software tools. Design visualisation, reality modelling and virtual reality (VR) are increasingly being used to augment bread-and-butter CAD and BIM workflows.
In recent years, architects have been expanding their software armouries.
The new $649 AMD Radeon Pro W6600 pro GPU offers users of CAD and BIM software a gateway into design viz and VR, now and in the future.