AMD Radeon Pro W6400 Review: Low Power RDNA 2 For Budget Workstations


AMD Radeon Pro W6400: Cryptography, Image Processing and Rendering Tests

How We Configured Our Test Systems: We tested the professional graphics cards represented in this article on a Gigabyte X570 Pro Wi-Fi motherboard, equipped with a Ryzen 9 5950X and 16GB of G.SKILL DDR4 RAM clocked at 3,200MHz. The first thing we did when configuring the test system was enter the UEFI and set all values to their "high performance" defaults, then we disabled any integrated peripherals that wouldn't be put to use, and enabled Resizable BAR support. The memory's clock was dialed in to its optimal performance settings using its XMP profile and the solid state drive was then formatted and Windows 11 Professional was installed and fully updated. When the Windows installation was complete, we installed all of the drivers, applications and benchmark tools necessary to complete our tests.

Please note, in the absence of a lower-end competitive NVIDIA card like the T600 or T1000, we tested the most mainstream Quadro we had available, a Quadro RTX 4000, for an additional reference point. The Quadro RTX 4000 is a higher-end, much more expensive card than the Radeon Pro W6400.

radeon pro w6400 in box

Out Test System Configuration:


Hardware Used:
AMD Ryzen 9 5950X
(3.4GHz - 4.9GHz, 16-Core)

MSI X570 Godlike (AMD X570 Chipset)
16GB G.SKILL DDR4-3200

Samsung SSD 970 EVO
Integrated Audio
Integrated Network

NVIDIA Quadro RTX 4000
AMD Radeon Pro WX 5100
AMD Radeon Pro W5500
AMD Radeon Pro W6600
AMD Radeon Pro W6400
Relevant Software:
Windows 11 Pro
AMD Radeon Pro v22.Q1
NVIDIA Quadro Drivers v511.09

Benchmarks Used:
SPECviewperf 2020
LuxMark v4
Blender v2.93.1
SiSoft SANDRA 2021
VRMark
Blackmagic RAW Speed Test
IndigoBench
3DMark DXR Feature Test

SiSoft SANDRA 20201 GPU Benchmarks

SANDRA's GPGPU Image Processing benchmark runs through an array of filters on its reference data and offers up an aggregate score, derived from a multitude of individual results. Its GPGPU Cryptography benchmark churns through an assortment of workloads, and presents individual results for overall bandwidth, AES256 encryption and decryption, and SHA2-256 hashing bandwidth. CUDA and OpenCL code paths are available in these tests, but we used OpenCL on all cards. Previously, using the CUDA path with NVIDIA GPUs resulted in better performance, but OpenCL actually outperforms CUDA in the latest versions of this test.

image processing 2 radeon pro w6400

The new Radeon Pro W6400 more than doubles the performance of the older Radeon Pro WX 5100 here and nearly catches the Quadro RTX 4000 and previous-gen Radeon Pro W5500. The higher-end Radeon Pro W6600, however, offers a significant step up in performance.

crypto 1 radeon pro w6400 1


crypto 2 radeon pro w6400 1


crypto 3 radeon pro w6400 1
SANDRA's various Cryptography-related benchmarks had the Radeon Pro W6400 outrunning the older Radeon Pro WX 5100 by significant margins in two of the three tests, but it trails the previous-gen W5500 by about ~35%, give or take.

LuxMark v4.0 Benchmarks

LuxMark is a cross-platform, OpenCL-accelerated 3D rendering benchmark. It's a tool based on the open source LuxRender physically-based spectral rendering engine, which accurately models the transportation of light and supports high dynamic range. LuxRender features a number of material types to allow rendering of photo-realistic and artistic scenes. LuxRender is free software, licensed under the GPL, that offers plugins for packages like Blender, Maya, Cinema 4D and 3DS Max.

luxmark radeon pro w6400 1

As we've seen in every test thus far, the Radeon Pro W6400 offers better performance than the Radeon Pro WX 5100, but the higher-end, more-expensive cards are a significant step up. The W6400 falls smack-dab in between the WX 5100 and W5500 here.

IndigoBench Rendering Benchmarks

IndigoBench is based on Indigo 4's advanced rendering engine and offers both CPU and GPU rendering modes for its two built-in models. The standalone benchmark is available for Windows, MacOS, and Linux and outputs results in M/Samples per second.

indigo bench radeon pro w6400 1

The Radeon Pro W6400 continues to outrun the previous-gen Radeon Pro WX 5100, and its newer architecture with Infinity Cache actually give it the edge over the Radeon Pro W5500 as well.

Blender v2.93.1 Rendering Benchmarks

Blender is a free and open source 3D creation suite that can handle everything from modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, even video editing and game creation. It has a built-in benchmarking tool that will track the time it takes to complete rendering a particular model. We used a GPU-focused BMW and the "fishy cat" models for these tests...

blender radeon pro w6400 1

The new Radeon Pro W6400 significantly outruns the older, Polaris-based Radeon Pro WX 5100 in Blender, but still ends up trailing the previous-gen Radeon pro W5500. Although it's a much higher-end, more expensive card, it's worth pointing out that Blender supports the OptiX ray tracing engine on NVIDIA's latest architectures, and it gives the Quadro RTX 4000 a massive performance boost here.

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