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AMD FirePro D500

AMD FirePro D500: A Professional Tool in the World of GPUs. Analysis in 2025

Introduction

The AMD FirePro D500 graphics card, released in 2013, was originally positioned as a solution for professionals—engineers, designers, and rendering specialists. Despite its age, it maintains niche relevance in 2025 due to its reliability in specific tasks. However, its position in the market is now occupied by more modern counterparts. Let’s explore who might still find this model useful today and why.

1. Architecture and Key Features

Architecture: The FirePro D500 is built on the Graphics Core Next (GCN 1.0) microarchitecture. This is the first generation of GCN, which became the foundation for many subsequent AMD GPUs.

- Manufacturing Process: 28 nm (for comparison, modern cards in 2025 use 5-7 nm).

- Compute Units: 1792 stream processors, 112 texture units, 32 raster operations pipelines.

- Unique Features:

- Support for OpenCL 1.2 and DirectX 11.2 (but not DirectX 12 Ultimate or Vulkan 2.0).

- Hardware acceleration for professional video compression formats.

- Lack of modern technologies such as ray tracing (RTX) or DLSS equivalents.

By 2025, the architecture is outdated, but its accuracy and stability are still valued in specific tasks (e.g., rendering in CAD applications).

2. Memory: Type, Capacity, and Bandwidth

- Memory Type: GDDR5 (not GDDR6 or HBM).

- Capacity: 3 GB per GPU, totaling 6 GB (dual-chip configuration).

- Memory Bus: 384-bit (per chip), total bandwidth — 264 GB/s.

- Impact on Performance:

- For modern games and applications, 6 GB of GDDR5 is insufficient, especially at 4K.

- In professional tasks (rendering models), the capacity is enough for medium complexity projects, but complex scenes can cause stuttering.

3. Gaming Performance: Nostalgia or Failure?

The FirePro D500 was not designed for gaming, but in 2025, it can be considered for running older projects:

- CS:GO (1080p): ~90-110 FPS on medium settings.

- The Witcher 3 (1080p, low settings): 25-35 FPS.

- Cyberpunk 2077 (1080p, minimum settings): <20 FPS (practically unplayable).

Conclusion: The card is unsuitable for modern games. Support for resolutions above 1080p is lacking due to insufficient memory and weak architecture. Ray tracing and similar technologies are not supported.

4. Professional Tasks: Where D500 is Still Relevant

- 3D Modeling: In Autodesk Maya or SolidWorks, the card exhibits stability, but the rendering speed is 2-3 times lower than that of modern Radeon Pro W7800 models.

- Video Editing: OpenCL support allows work in DaVinci Resolve on projects up to 4K, but rendering will take longer.

- Scientific Computing: Limited support for OpenCL 1.2 makes it poorly suited for modern AI/ML tasks.

Advice: Consider the D500 only for outdated workstations where compatibility with old software is critical.

5. Power Consumption and Thermal Output

- TDP: 274 W — a high figure even for 2025.

- Cooling: Blower-style, noisy under load.

- Recommendations:

- A case with good ventilation (at least 3 fans).

- An ideal option would be workstations with PCIe 3.0 support and a powerful PSU.

6. Comparison with Competitors

- NVIDIA Quadro K5000 (2013): Similar specs but better optimization for CUDA. By 2025, both cards are outdated.

- AMD Radeon Pro W6600 (2021): 8 GB GDDR6, support for DirectX 12 Ultimate, 100 W TDP. Price for new devices starts at $600.

- NVIDIA RTX A2000 (2021): 12 GB GDDR6, ray tracing, price starting at $450.

Conclusion: The FirePro D500 lags behind even budget modern professional cards.

7. Practical Advice

- Power Supply: At least 500 W (considering the age of the PSU).

- Compatibility: Requires a motherboard with PCIe 3.0 x16.

- Drivers: Official support has been discontinued. Use the latest available versions from AMD’s website (from 2021).

- Price: New devices are not available. On the secondary market, prices range from $50-100 (2025 estimate).

8. Pros and Cons

Pros:

- Reliability in older professional applications.

- Support for multi-monitor configurations (up to 4 monitors).

Cons:

- High power consumption.

- Lack of support for modern APIs and technologies.

- Limited memory capacity.

9. Overall Conclusion: Who is the FirePro D500 Suitable For?

This graphics card is a relic of the past, which in 2025 may only be useful in two cases:

1. For support of outdated workstations, where compatibility with old software is critical (e.g., specialized industrial PCs).

2. As a temporary solution for a very limited budget in basic tasks (viewing CAD models, working with 2D graphics).

For all other scenarios (gaming, 4K editing, AI), it is better to choose modern counterparts: AMD Radeon Pro W7000 series or NVIDIA RTX A-series.

Postscript

The AMD FirePro D500 is an example of how quickly technology becomes outdated. In 2025, it should be viewed only as a museum piece or a highly specialized tool. Yet, even today, it reminds us of how far the GPU industry has advanced over the past decade.

Basic

Label Name

AMD

Platform

Desktop

Launch Date

January 2014

Model Name

FirePro D500

Generation

FirePro

Bus Interface

PCIe 3.0 x16

Transistors

4,313 million

Compute Units

TMUs

Texture Mapping Units (TMUs) serve as components of the GPU, which are capable of rotating, scaling, and distorting binary images, and then placing them as textures onto any plane of a given 3D model. This process is called texture mapping.

Foundry

TSMC

Process Size

28 nm

Architecture

GCN 1.0

Memory Specifications

Memory Size

3GB

Memory Type

GDDR5

Memory Bus

The memory bus width refers to the number of bits of data that the video memory can transfer within a single clock cycle. The larger the bus width, the greater the amount of data that can be transmitted instantaneously, making it one of the crucial parameters of video memory. The memory bandwidth is calculated as: Memory Bandwidth = Memory Frequency x Memory Bus Width / 8. Therefore, when the memory frequencies are similar, the memory bus width will determine the size of the memory bandwidth.

384bit

Memory Clock

1270MHz

Bandwidth

Memory bandwidth refers to the data transfer rate between the graphics chip and the video memory. It is measured in bytes per second, and the formula to calculate it is: memory bandwidth = working frequency × memory bus width / 8 bits.

243.8 GB/s

Theoretical Performance

Pixel Rate

Pixel fill rate refers to the number of pixels a graphics processing unit (GPU) can render per second, measured in MPixels/s (million pixels per second) or GPixels/s (billion pixels per second). It is the most commonly used metric to evaluate the pixel processing performance of a graphics card.

23.20 GPixel/s

Texture Rate

Texture fill rate refers to the number of texture map elements (texels) that a GPU can map to pixels in a single second.

69.60 GTexel/s

FP64 (double)

An important metric for measuring GPU performance is floating-point computing capability. Double-precision floating-point numbers (64-bit) are required for scientific computing that demands a wide numeric range and high accuracy, while single-precision floating-point numbers (32-bit) are used for common multimedia and graphics processing tasks. Half-precision floating-point numbers (16-bit) are used for applications like machine learning, where lower precision is acceptable.

556.8 GFLOPS

FP32 (float)

An important metric for measuring GPU performance is floating-point computing capability. Single-precision floating-point numbers (32-bit) are used for common multimedia and graphics processing tasks, while double-precision floating-point numbers (64-bit) are required for scientific computing that demands a wide numeric range and high accuracy. Half-precision floating-point numbers (16-bit) are used for applications like machine learning, where lower precision is acceptable.

2.272 TFLOPS

Miscellaneous

Shading Units

The most fundamental processing unit is the Streaming Processor (SP), where specific instructions and tasks are executed. GPUs perform parallel computing, which means multiple SPs work simultaneously to process tasks.

1536

L1 Cache

16 KB (per CU)

L2 Cache

768KB

TDP

274W

Vulkan Version

Vulkan is a cross-platform graphics and compute API by Khronos Group, offering high performance and low CPU overhead. It lets developers control the GPU directly, reduces rendering overhead, and supports multi-threading and multi-core processors.

1.2

OpenCL Version

1.2

OpenGL

4.6

DirectX

12 (11_1)

Shader Model

5.1

ROPs

The Raster Operations Pipeline (ROPs) is primarily responsible for handling lighting and reflection calculations in games, as well as managing effects like anti-aliasing (AA), high resolution, smoke, and fire. The more demanding the anti-aliasing and lighting effects in a game, the higher the performance requirements for the ROPs; otherwise, it may result in a sharp drop in frame rate.

Suggested PSU

600W

Benchmarks

FP32 (float)

Score

2.272 TFLOPS

Compared to Other GPU

FP32 (float) / TFLOPS

GeForce GTX 780M Mac Edition

2.399 +5.6%

Tesla K10

2.335 +2.8%

FirePro D500

2.272

Radeon RX 560X Mobile

2.236 -1.6%

Quadro M2200 Mobile

2.164 -4.8%