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AMD Radeon Pro 560

AMD Radeon Pro 560: A Professional Tool with Glances at the Past

April 2025

Introduction

The AMD Radeon Pro 560 graphics card, released in 2017, remains a niche solution for professionals who value stability and compatibility. Despite its outdated architecture, it remains relevant in specific scenarios. In this article, we'll explore who should pay attention to this model in 2025.

Architecture and Key Features

Polaris: Reliability Over Innovation

The Radeon Pro 560 is built on the Polaris (14nm GlobalFoundries technology) architecture. This generation is known for its energy efficiency, but it lacks support for modern features such as hardware ray tracing or AI acceleration.

Unique Technologies:

- FidelityFX: AMD's toolkit for image enhancement (contrast sharpening, upscaling). However, only the basic version is implemented in the Pro 560, without hardware optimization.

- FreeSync: Support for adaptive synchronization for comfortable real-time rendering.

What It Lacks:

- Counterparts to DLSS (NVIDIA) or Ray Accelerators (RDNA 2/3). Ray tracing requires software emulation, which significantly reduces performance.

Memory: Modest Specifications

- Type: GDDR5 (an outdated standard relevant in 2016-2019).

- Volume: 4 GB — the minimum level for professional tasks in 2025.

- Bandwidth: 224 GB/s (256-bit bus, 7 GHz frequency).

Impact on Performance:

- In games: 4 GB is sufficient for 1080p at medium settings, but projects with HD textures (e.g., Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty) experience drops due to buffer overflows.

- In professional applications: Limited memory complicates work with heavy 3D scenes or 8K video.

Gaming Performance: Modest Ambitions

The Radeon Pro 560 is aimed at the professional segment, but let's assess its gaming potential:

- 1080p (Medium settings):

- Apex Legends: 45–55 FPS.

- Fortnite: 50–60 FPS (no Ray Tracing).

- Hogwarts Legacy: 25–30 FPS (lower detail settings required).

- 1440p and 4K:

- Not recommended. Even in less demanding games (CS2, DOTA 2), the frame rate rarely exceeds 40 FPS.

Ray Tracing:

The lack of hardware support makes RTX effects (reflections, global illumination) inaccessible without a critical drop in FPS.

Professional Tasks: Narrow Specialization

Video Editing

- Premiere Pro: Rendering 1080p projects with basic effects results in 60-70% GPU load. A 4K timeline causes lag even in proxy mode.

- DaVinci Resolve: OpenCL support ensures stability, but export speed is 2-3 times slower than the Radeon Pro W6600.

3D Modeling

- Blender (Cycles): Rendering the BMW Benchmark scene takes ~45 minutes (compared to 8 minutes on RX 7600).

- AutoCAD: Sufficient for 2D drawings, but complex 3D models need optimization.

Scientific Computing

- OpenCL: Support exists, but performance in tasks like molecular modeling lags even behind budget NVIDIA GTX 1650.

Power Consumption and Heat Dissipation

- TDP: 75 W — powered through the PCIe slot, no additional cable required.

- Cooling: Both passive and active (with a fan) options. For prolonged loads, an active system is preferable.

- Case Recommendations:

- At least 1 intake fan and 1 exhaust fan.

- Compact cases (e.g., Fractal Design Core 500) are suitable, but avoid "hot" builds with multiple HDDs.

Comparison with Competitors

In the Professional Segment:

- NVIDIA Quadro P1000 (4 GB GDDR5): Comparable in performance, but worse in OpenCL tasks. Price: $250–300.

- AMD Radeon Pro W6600 (8 GB GDDR6): 2-3 times faster, supports AV1 and PCIe 4.0. Price: $500–600.

In the Gaming Segment:

- NVIDIA GTX 1650 (4 GB GDDR6): 15-20% faster in games, similar price ($200–230).

Practical Tips

Power Supply

- Power: 300–400 W (e.g., Corsair CX450).

- Connectors: 6-pin PCIe (not always required).

Compatibility

- Platforms: Windows 10/11, Linux (with open drivers), macOS (only in older Mac Pro models).

- Motherboards: PCIe 3.0 x16.

Drivers

- Radeon Pro Software: Stable but lacks support for new APIs (DirectX 12 Ultimate). Updates are infrequent.

Pros and Cons

Pros:

- Low power consumption.

- Silent versions with passive cooling.

- Optimization for professional applications (SolidWorks, AutoCAD).

Cons:

- Outdated architecture.

- Weak gaming potential.

- Limited memory capacity.

Final Conclusion: Who is Radeon Pro 560 Suitable For?

This graphics card is a choice for:

1. Professionals using specialized software with a focus on stability (e.g., CAD designers).

2. Owners of old PCs who need an upgrade without replacing the power supply.

3. Hackintosh enthusiasts building systems for macOS.

Why not for gamers? Even budget models from 2025 (like the Intel Arc A580) offer better performance for the same $200–250.

If you're seeking a "workhorse" for less demanding tasks, the Radeon Pro 560 can still serve. However, for a future-proof build, consider modern solutions like the Radeon Pro W7600 or NVIDIA RTX A2000.

Basic

Label Name

AMD

Platform

Mobile

Launch Date

April 2017

Model Name

Radeon Pro 560

Generation

Radeon Pro Mac

Bus Interface

PCIe 3.0 x8

Transistors

3,000 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

GlobalFoundries

Process Size

14 nm

Architecture

GCN 4.0

Memory Specifications

Memory Size

4GB

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.

128bit

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.

81.28 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.

14.51 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.

58.05 GTexel/s

FP16 (half)

An important metric for measuring GPU performance is floating-point computing capability. Half-precision floating-point numbers (16-bit) are used for applications like machine learning, where lower precision is acceptable. 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.

1.858 TFLOPS

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.

116.1 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.

1.821 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.

1024

L1 Cache

16 KB (per CU)

L2 Cache

1024KB

TDP

75W

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

2.1

OpenGL

4.6

DirectX

12 (12_0)

Power Connectors

None

Shader Model

6.4

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.

Benchmarks

FP32 (float)

Score

1.821 TFLOPS

Compared to Other GPU

FP32 (float) / TFLOPS

Radeon R7 265

1.932 +6.1%

Playstation 4 Slim GPU

1.88 +3.2%

Radeon Pro 560

1.821

Radeon Graphics 512SP

1.756 -3.6%

Radeon RX Vega 10 Mobile

1.698 -6.8%