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AMD Radeon Pro 560X

AMD Radeon Pro 560X: A Professional Tool or an Outdated Solution?

April 2025

Introduction

The AMD Radeon Pro 560X has been on the market for several years, yet it still raises questions among users. This product is positioned as a professional GPU for workstations and creative tasks, but how does it cope with modern challenges? In this article, we will examine all aspects of the card—from its architecture to practical usage recommendations.

Architecture and Key Features

Polaris: A Legacy of the Past

The Radeon Pro 560X is built on the Polaris architecture (GCN 4th generation), which debuted back in 2016. The manufacturing process is 14 nm, which appears archaic by 2025 standards. In the era of 5 nm chips from NVIDIA and AMD, this limits energy efficiency and potential for scaling.

Unique Features

The card supports AMD technologies such as FidelityFX, including:

- FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) 1.0 — performance enhancement through upscaling (but not as advanced as FSR 3.0).

- Radeon Image Sharpening — image clarity enhancement.

There is no hardware support for Ray Tracing (RT cores) or NVIDIA's equivalent of DLSS. For professional tasks, Vulkan API and OpenCL 2.0 are relevant, but the card cannot support modern standards like DirectX 12 Ultimate.

Memory: Modest Capabilities

Specifications

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

- Capacity: 4 GB.

- Bus: 256-bit.

- Bandwidth: 224 GB/s (memory clock speed of 7 GHz).

Impact on Performance

4 GB of memory in 2025 is a considerable drawback. For example, rendering 3D scenes in Blender with 8K textures or working with 4K footage in DaVinci Resolve will result in slowdowns. In gaming, memory capacity limits graphical settings: even at 1080p, projects like Cyberpunk 2077 will require lower texture quality.

Gaming Performance: Suitable Only for Undemanding Tasks

FPS Examples (1080p, Medium Settings):

- CS2: 90–110 FPS.

- Fortnite (without Ray Tracing): 50–60 FPS.

- Red Dead Redemption 2: 30–35 FPS.

- Hogwarts Legacy: 25–30 FPS (requires FSR for play).

Resolutions Above 1080p

- 1440p: Only for older games (e.g., The Witcher 3 — 40 FPS on medium).

- 4K: Not recommended — drops to 15–20 FPS even with FSR.

Ray Tracing

Hardware ray tracing is absent. Software emulation via FidelityFX GI is possible but provides minimal visual improvement at a significant load on the GPU.

Professional Tasks: Narrow Specialization

Video Editing

In Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve, the card shows modest results:

- Rendering 1080p video: 1.5–2x real-time.

- 4K timeline: lagging may occur without proxy files.

3D Modeling and Rendering

- Blender: OpenCL rendering is slower than NVIDIA (due to the lack of CUDA). For example, rendering a BMW scene takes about 25 minutes compared to approximately 12 minutes on an RTX 3050.

- SolidWorks: Stable performance, but complex assemblies require optimization.

Scientific Calculations

Support for OpenCL allows the GPU to be used in machine learning (on basic models), but 4 GB of memory limits data sizes.

Power Consumption and Heat Generation

- TDP: 100 W.

- Cooling Recommendations:

- Case with 2–3 fans for ventilation.

- A tower with a front air intake is preferable (e.g., Fractal Design Meshify C).

- The card is not suitable for compact PCs—minimum length of 200 mm.

Comparison with Competitors

AMD Radeon Pro W5500

- Pros: 8 GB GDDR6, RDNA 1.0, PCIe 4.0 support.

- Cons: Price ($450) compared to $300–350 for the Pro 560X.

NVIDIA Quadro T1000

- Pros: CUDA cores, better rendering software.

- Cons: 4 GB GDDR6, more expensive ($400).

Gaming Alternatives (NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650)

- Price: $170–200.

- Games: Comparable performance, but no professional drivers.

Practical Tips

Power Supply

Minimum of 450 W (recommended 500 W for headroom). Examples:

- Corsair CX550 (80+ Bronze).

- Be Quiet! System Power 10.

Compatibility

- macOS: Supported in older Mac Pro (2019) and Hackintosh.

- Platforms: Works better on PCIe 3.0 but is compatible with 4.0.

Drivers

Use Pro drivers (stability is more important than freshness). Avoid Adrenalin Edition—potential conflicts in work applications.

Pros and Cons

Pros:

- Affordable price for the professional segment ($300–350).

- Reliability and long service life.

- Good support for OpenCL and professional software.

Cons:

- Outdated architecture and 14 nm manufacturing process.

- Only 4 GB of memory.

- No hardware Ray Tracing.

Conclusion: Who Is the Radeon Pro 560X Suitable For?

This card is a choice for budget-conscious professional users who need stability rather than maximum performance. It is suitable for:

- Freelancers working with 2D graphics and simple 3D.

- Engineers for CAD applications.

- Owners of older Mac Pros looking to upgrade.

Gamers and those working with 4K/8K content should consider more modern solutions (such as the Radeon Pro W7600 or NVIDIA RTX 4060). In 2025, the Radeon Pro 560X remains a niche product, but it is still relevant for its intended tasks.

Publication date: April 2025.

Basic

Label Name

AMD

Platform

Mobile

Launch Date

July 2018

Model Name

Radeon Pro 560X

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

1470MHz

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.

94.08 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.

16.06 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.

64.26 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.

2.056 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.

128.5 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.

2.015 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

2.015 TFLOPS

Compared to Other GPU

FP32 (float) / TFLOPS

GeForce GTX 750 Ti OEM

2.15 +6.7%

GeForce GTX 660 OEM

2.087 +3.6%

Radeon Pro 560X

2.015

Radeon HD 6870 X2

1.976 -1.9%

Radeon R9 M385X

1.932 -4.1%