AMD has released its new dual-Fiji graphics card. The AMD Radeon Pro Duo is now available, is priced at 1500+ USD, and there are no reviews for it as of yet. This is precisely one of the reasons we marked the previous story as rumour (regarding the performance of this new GPU).
The AMD Radeon Pro Duo packs 2×4096 streaming processors, 2×4 GB HBM video memory, its clock frequency can be turbo boosted to 1000Mhz and its memory can be turbo boosted to 500Mhz (allowing for up to 512 GB/s memory bandwidth). This dual-card requires three 8-pin power connectors and its TDP is managed to 350W.
Unfortunately, the only benchmarks that have been revealed so far are those of Expreview, so take them with a grain of salt. A Greek hardware site also revealed some benchmarks that are really fishy, so there is no point at all linking at them (for example, they claim that 2XGTX970 offer 115% better performance than a single GTX970 in Tomb Raider in 4K, and that the difference between a GTX980 and a GTX970 is only 1fps in Assassin’s Creed: Unity in 1080p. So yeah, stay away from those benchies).
AMD has released some official benchies that can be viewed below.
What really puzzles us with the AMD Radeon Pro Duo is its price. Believe it or not, you can actually buy three Fury X graphics cards for the same amount of money required for a single AMD Radeon Pro Duo, something that makes us wonder why on Earth this card is priced so high. In other words, AMD is basically killing its own GPU right from the start.
Given also the fact that Polaris 10 & 11 are just around the corner, we have to wonder why the AMD Radeon Pro Duo was released at all. Because if the high-end Polaris GPU is faster than the AMD Radeon Pro Duo, it makes no sense to buy this dual-card GPU. On the other hand, if the high-end Polaris GPU is not as powerful as AMD Radeon Pro Duo, then NVIDIA will have a chance to reclaim its crown with its upcoming high-end Pascal GPU.
All in all, the AMD Radeon Pro Duo feels like an overpriced GPU. Whether or not this will be a failed product – especially since AMD’s new architecture GPUs are around the corner – remains to be seen.
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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