Debuts on the Radeon Duo Pro market, the card for those who develop in VR

At the GDC exhibition focuses on the world of game developers that was held in San Francisco last month of March, AMD has officially shown its proposed new top of the range Radeon family. We talk about the Radeon Pro Duo model, card that combines two GPUs on a single PCB Fiji family and that is proposed by the American company as a reference solution for those who develop solutions related to virtual reality, and for this reason require the maximum power of possible development.

Radeon Pro Duo debuted officially on the market today, including the two family GPU Fiji each with 4,096 stream processors and a video memory HBM, High Bandwidth Memory, equal to 4 Gbytes. In fact this card corresponds to the technical specifications, two Radeon R9 Nano boards mounted on a single PCB: the clock frequency reaches a maximum value of 1 GHz, less of only 50 MHz compared to what is offered by the Radeon R9 Fury- X which is the best proposal AMD range between the single-GPU solutions.

Radeon Pro Duo is offered to an official exchange listing of US $ 1,499, excluding taxes: this is a very substantial figure, higher than required for a pair of Radeon R9 Fury-X or a Radeon R9 Nano cards. A list of this kind is justified by the uniqueness of this proposal, which combines the power of two graphics cards processing on a single PCB.

To obtain this result AMD has resorted to an integrated liquid cooling system, which provides a single 120 mm fan that cools the radiator with the mandate liquid on the two water block, one for each GPU, besides taking care of the heat generated by HBM memory and from the power circuitry of the card.

AMD indicates this product for a TDP level that is equal to 350 Watt: it is a double-digit compared to the 175 Watt indicated for the Radeon R9 Nano document model which in fact represents the technical specifications for the half of a Radeon Pro Duo solution . This is slightly higher than what is the maximum power consumption typical of the top single-GPU video cards range, but well less than 500 watts of Radeon R9 295X2 card that AMD has so far proposed as its dual GPU card top of the range .

Power sees the presence of 3 connectors 8 pins each: this choice allows, on paper, to provide the card until 525 Watt peak (150 watts from each of 3 plus 75 Watt PCI Express power connectors from the video card) because it has left to imagine interesting overclocking margins as this is not a product intended for enthusiast but more to graphics professionals. Connections with displays are ensured by the presence of 3 ports Display Port, flanked by a HDMI.

AMD has provided some indications of the performance capabilities of Radeon Pro Duo: + 50% compared to competitor NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan X and + 35% if the comparison is made with the Radeon R9 295X2. Here in the gallery the chart provided by AMD, but as always we prefer to rely on our tests to actually see what the potential of this card. Like all solutions to two GPU Radeon Pro Duo card it depends markedly from the optimization driver, called to better manage the two video chip making sure that the workload on both ports. Also for this reason AMD first promotes this tab for virtual reality environments, in which each GPU is assigned to one of the two integrated display in VR viewer and therefore can be exploited best by the application.